Microstock Calendar

Photographer Emily Schiffer has organized a silent auction fundraiser, Open Sky To Skyscrapers, on Thursday, July 22 from 6-9 p.m. at VII Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, to support her My Viewpoint Youth Photography Initiative. Schiffer has been teaching students in the program for five years.

In 2005 Schiffer, the winner of the first Arnold Newman Prize for "New Directions in Photographic Portraiture" in PDN's 2010 Photo Annual, partnered with the Sioux YMCA in South Dakota to found a photography program for youth aged 6 to 18 on the Cheyenne River Reservation. In addition to learning how to interpret life through a camera, Schiffer’s students developed and printed their images in the darkroom (see “Teaching and Learning,” PDN May 2010) and created a photo community where photography is collaborative, and where knowledgeable students can teach alongside their instructors. 

In the next phase of this program, students and instructors are designing a group exhibition of their work. Five teenage photographers and three adults have traveled from South Dakota to New York to explore the ways in which the My Viewpoint youth want to exhibit their work and to begin the curation process. “In New York they’ll meet with curators and artists and then we can talk about what our pictures are like and how to install the photos in a way that helps the viewer connect with the subjects,” Schiffer told PDN in May.

An online preview of the work to be auctioned off begins on July 15th at www.myviewpoint.org and includes images by Schiffer as well as Ben Lowy, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Carlys High Bear, Suné Woods, Wyatt Gallery, Marvi Lacar and many others.                 

Video sharing site Vimeo has announced that it has added Creative Commons licensing options for its members. The new feature enables video creators to specify--and thereby limit--the rights of others to copy, distribute, and make derivatives of videos posted to Vimeo.

Vimeo says it has added Creative Commons licensing options because those licenses are "a highly desired feature by the Vimeo community." The feature will also distinguish Vimeo from competing video sharing sites, namely YouTube, which don't give contributors the option to restrict how their uploaded works are used by others.

But is Creative Commons an actual benefit to creators, or is it giving creators (and sites like Vimeo) a false sense of security and control?

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that was established to make it easy for people to share, remix and re-use copyrighted works with the blessing of creators, while still enabling creators to retain control of certain copyrights--primarily commercial usage rights.

To use Creative Commons licenses, users on Vimeo or any other site that supports CC attach a combination of four basic CC licensing components to their work. The broadest is Attribution, allowing any use of the work so long as it is attributed to the copyright holder. A so-called Share Alike option allows derivative works as long as they are distributed under a CC license identical to the license for the original work. Non-Commercial and No Derivative Works options bar commercial uses and derivative works, respectively.

Attribution never hurts, and may help commercial licensees track down creators and pay them. And there's an argument to be made that people will respect you--and the copyrights you reserve--if you allow some free but limited usage rights to your work.

However, the efficacy of Creative Commons licenses have yet to be tested in court. CC licenses are contracts, which work only when both parties agree to them. It's not clear, for instance, how much protection a CC license would give a creator in a case where a user went beyond the scope of the license and then said they didn't understand its limits.