Peter Chen 2.0: licensing
I do not assign "copyright" to any of my intellectual property. When I first started teaching at College of DuPage in 2005, I used a "copyleft" license to freely share my educational work as well as software.
This information is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
As I started to engage in citizen science projects around 2020, I decided to use mostly the Creative Commons "CC BY" license to ensure free sharing of all media.
You are free to: share..., adapt..., with attribution — give appropriate credit.
Some of my work are under the "CC0" license, dedicated to the public domain and waiving all my rights.
- inaturalist
A CC BY or CC0 license allows free sharing of images with
GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) and with
wikimedia.
- wikimedia
A CC BY or CC0 license allows media such as images and videos to be uploaded; the media can then be used in wikipedia articles. In fact a sem-automated process allows users to upload files of properly licensed media from inaturalist, flickr, vimeo, youtube, etc.
- youtube
youtube allows the uploader to choose a CC BY license, in which case the video will not contain commercial advertisements and the user cannot "monetize" it (share in the money earned from the advertisements). Note that screenshots from CC BY videos can be used in wikimedia.
However, if the video contains copyrighted material claimed by a 3rd party, the copyright owner can over-ride the CC BY license, and monetize it for the copyright owner; in some cases the copyright owner will take down the video. The vast majority of youtube videos use the standard youtube license, with advertisements and restricted sharing with other platforms such as wikimedia.
Unfortunately, many websites slap on copycat copyright notices in the mistaken impression that this somehow offers protection; this is overstatement of rights. For example, a responsible user can copy copyrighted material under fair use terms.
Most users are not responsible at all; they ignore any notices and may not be aware of them if they found an image from a search engine and just download.
So, the real effect of a restrictive license only prevents abiding entities such as wikipedia from sharing those resources.
In addition, many sites contain images and texts copied from other sources, in those cases a copyright notice is not even inappropriate, but there is usually no copyright police to over-ride the license or issue a take down.
An example was when I managed the corporate website for AT&T - Lucent Technologies, and my big boss ordered me to update the copyright notice to the current year. While it was true that most of our content were produced in-house, many images were borrowed from other online sources, just like most websites. The copyright did not protect any sensitive information either: we screened all proprietary content and kept those inside our firewall, away from public eyes. The only way to "protect" valued assets is to erect firewalls or member-only gateways accessible via a paid subscription; but even then it is hard to prevent paid customers from downloading once they log in.
CC BY