Legal stuff...
It's my pleasure to share my pictures with people who share my interest in rugby memorabilia ! So far, I have contributed to several books, academic projects, newspaper articles, rugby exhibitions or conferences, menus (yes, a "rugby" pub in South France...) and.... Wikipedia.
Most of my pictures belong to the public domain (basically, because they are old enough - usually 70 years after initial publishing for newspaper prints or 70 after the death of the artist for artworks, under French law). Still, you have to deal with me to clear reproductions rights if you want to use my pictures... as I provide for the scans or the digital sources.
Either this blog or my photo hosting service (Flickr) do promote Creative Commons (check the logo in the right column) as a licencing system that brings both a strict legal framework and a maximum flexbility for the content owner : I can elect whether commercial use is permitted or not, whether modifications are permitted or not, under which conditions if any... For instance, this website is published under a Creative Commons licence "attribution" "share alike" or CC BY SA (cf the pictos in the right column under "legal stuff") which means that there is no restriction to the use of my work, provided that you "attribute" it to me ("BY") and that you share it in return with others ("SA" "Share Alike"... you don't add copyrights on it !)...
One click to get a "human readable" licence as they call it... another click to get a full text "lawyer readabale" licence code ...
It also has some technical implications (techo-adverse people can skip to the next paragraph...). All my pictures at Flickr carry this legal information as a metadata, so that online services could determine automatically if pictures are used (copy, print, etc...) in compliance with this CC licence...
Creative Commons framework easily let interested people use my pictures into their own projects... without having to enter into long lasting - and sometimes expensive - copyrights clearances... As long as you respect the CC rules, you don't even have to ask me...
The upper picture is a great example... last year, during the Rugby World Cup, CRDP d'Alsace (Centre Regional de Documentation Pedagogique) - a French public organization that provides documents, pictures, texts, etc... to school and college teachers to help them prepare their lectures - have made available a dozen of my pictures to illustrate some facts about rugby history : it's exactly what Creative Commons licences are aiming for... : sharing, enriching, creating something new... and sharing it again for the benefit of everyone...
And now some French kids know about the Maori Tour in France in October 1926...
Congratulations to the French Ministry of Education for this fair use of Creative Commons licences !
