If you have a number of photos on Flickr you can quite frequently get people asking to use them in things. One particularly common example is NowPublic, a user-contribution news site. When they want a photo to cover a story, they send you a mail in Flickr to ask permission to use it. They have to do this in spite of the Creative Commons licenses on all my photos because Now Public isn’t a non-profit organisation.
This week I got a request from another for-profit organisation, a school textbook publisher in Argentina, Group Santillana, who wanted propose a photo of mine to illustrate a textbook chapter about public speaking. The particular photo was taken at the Free Speech rally in Trafalgar Square, organised in the shadow of the furore surrounding the Danish “Motoons” publication.
I was unsure in my mind about the legal status of photos like this, crowd shots with identifiable people in. I decided that I’m pretty sure it’s entirely reasonable to have this used in a textbook in Argentina, assuming I felt like donating the photo to a company for free. I spent some time mulling this over before realising that one of the placards being held in the photo was a drawing of Mohammed with Mickey Mouse ears. A double whammy of international religious outrage and intellectual property infringement!
Trying to resist the voices telling me that I absolutely should try and get this printed, I told the lady at Group Santillana that maybe this photo wasn’t such a good thing to print in a text book given the likelihood of offending either the second most populous religion on earth or one of the biggest media corporations. She agreed, so you get to see it instead.
Good post and a good pic, though I see what you mean. I had a similar dilemma about whether to let someone use a pic from Flickr… Mind you, I recently had a company called Schamp email me about using my pics their travel guides, which was a much more straightforward one to answer :)