[Commons-l] Making damn sure image attribution is very clear

[James Duncan Davidson]

As the guy who posted about this on his blog, I wanted to add in some  
additional comments...

1) Sorry that I hit everything in the middle of an outage. I've since  
edited my blog post to reflect that as it didn't need to be part of  
the original record.

2) I'd really appreciate consideration of changing the policy of not  
attributing third party photographs where they are displayed. There  
are many reasons for this, but primary is that it's an accepted  
practice to credit photographs with the photograph itself. As well,  
the Creative Commons attribution restriction does state that the  
attribution be given in a manner reasonable to the medium and the  
means. By crediting in a manner that is accepted and practiced in the  
photographic industry, it helps in a small way to let photographers  
know if the CC-license their material, it'll be used in a way that  
respects their wishes. Placing that data one click away is not  
obvious to users and doesn't feel "right" from the perspective of a  
copyright holder.

3) EXIF metadata should be preserved, even on resized images.  
Thumbnails can be recreated, so junking those isn't an issue. But  
stripping unrecoverable information, especially that which may  
contain author and license information, is a problem when the images  
are borrowed and used downstream. I wish I had a good way to strip  
just thumbnails, but I don't currently know of one. Flickr has the  
same practice as well, and it's annoying....

I realize that I'm not a part of your community and that I'm  
injecting an outside viewpoint. And, as a third party, there's only  
so much I can do. But I'm more than happy to discuss these issues if  
it is helpful.

James Duncan Davidson
james at duncandavidson.com
+1 503 784 8747


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