> Based on Journal X’s practices, my photographs would be
> isolated from the paper, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons,
> and available for corporations who normally pay for my
> images to get them as freebies.
For the author of this piece, I think the solution is relatively straightforward:
1. Point out to the journal that having a photo in one of their articles does not grant automatic permission to put that photo on Wikimedia. If the journal's software is unable to handle these cases separately, then the software should be corrected.
2. Ask Wikimedia kindly to remove the author's photos from their collection, or at least correct the license metadata. I'm sure the Wikimedia editors would be willing to do this, though they might become unhappy with the journal editor who uploaded photos without permission.
3. If someone uses the author's photos for commercial purposes, contact them and let them know that such use require a commercial license. They will likely be uncooperative (c.f. the various newspapers who like to source uncredited photos from Twitter), but some gentle reminders about copyright infringement's RIAA-engorged penalties should bring them around. If nothing else, they will likely become much stricter about validating ownership before using a photo.
Well, sort of. Certainly if you've released something under CC0 or WTFPL, any derivative work can be "relicensed" however they want. MIT and BSD and CC-BY have some fairly trivial conditions that must be respected and fulfilled, but otherwise a derivative work can still use a different license.
I don't think many people care about the particulars of open source software licenses except in the context of producing derivative works.
That makes no sense. People are asking GPL software to be relicensed under BSD/MIT to make them usable in situations where the GPL is a legal hassle or impossible to use. I doubt that people even consider relicensing BSD as something else (besides people practically downgrading BSD to GPL).
1. User wants to use my GPL'd library in their application. Their application is released as source code under the 3-clause BSD license.
2. User sends me an email asking me to change my library's license to MIT or 3-clause BSD so their open-source app can use it.
3. I reply with the longform equivalent of "u wot m8?"
4. They reply that if I change my license to MIT, they will be able to "relicense" it to 3-clause BSD and use it as a dependency in their application's build script.
5. I explain that they don't need permission to just depend on a library, since they're not distributing any of it. And besides, if they did include some of my code in their tarballs, they still can't change the license because they don't own the copyright.
I suspect this stems from the same sort of pseudo-religious copyright knowledge that leads to "no copyright intended" disclaimers on YouTube. Lots of people grew up in the era of Napster and copy-pasted MySpace javascript, and never really gave much thought to how copyright actually works.
While this paper illustrates an unfortunate side-effect, it's really no different to the Linux kernel rejecting code that isn't under a GPL2-compatible license.
The author's entire argument rests on this single sentence. And, so far as I know, it is incorrect.
[I think that by "should be" the author is really saying "is" in a flowery way: otherwise his entire article is a nonsense hypothetical rather than, as he says, something which happened in reality.]
Why do you think it is incorrect? See [1]:
> […] the fair use of a copyrighted work […] for purposes such as […] teaching […], scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
And let's say that he's self-published, or used some service where he owns the copyright. Even then, he can't change the license on something just because of "fair use". He is free to publish his article under Creative Commons, or license the figure, but he can't do both.
imho, it makes more sense for OP to use this fair use permission as a tool for generating potential interest for his work, and watch the magazines re-license them wrongly (scenario 3). if sufficient interest shows up, at least some new users may accept to pay for this media at the end. it all boils down to a conversion funnel analysis to decide which scenario makes more sense. ranting about it in a blog may also increase conversions.
The journal wants to ensure that anyone can read the articles and all supporting information so they insist the author of the piece allow them to publish it under a Creative Commons license. The author would like to use one of this photographer's pictures and requests the permission. The photographer doesn't want to allow that. He (the photographer) suggests "I'd be happy to let you could use it in the article as long as you won't let anyone else copy it", but that's not OK with the journal. So the picture doesn't get used.
All sounds right to me. That's how it's supposed to work.
This is working exactly as it is supposed to.
Perhaps the photographer should consider changing his or her business model wherein he or she gets paid upfront on a commissioned basis to take interesting photographs, and release everything freely (with the concomitant distribution benefits).
Greetings. -- Carlos