The Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed) just released the second edition of their openly licensed digital image collection, “American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action.” This edition features nearly 500 high-quality images of teachers and students licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0).
A screenshot of the digital collection from the Alliance for Excellent Education.
Captured by Allison Shelly (photojournalist and co-founder of Women Photojournalists of Washington) and funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, these images portray “deep learning” both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic at the UCLA Community School in Los Angeles and Sutton Middle School in Atlanta.
“These are some of the final images we have of classroom-based instruction prior to the coronavirus sending students and teachers home for months of online instruction,” said Deborah Delisle, All4Ed president and CEO. “The idea of deeper learning is evolving as schools across the country rethink how they deliver instruction, and we are excited to see what that shift produces in thoughtful, innovative ways of engaging students.”
Here at Creative Commons, we’re especially excited to use these images in relation to our work in Open Education. As we continue advocating for and supporting the development of OER policies globally, the images we use should accurately illustrate the messages we send. That’s why openly licensed stock photography collections (like this one!) that are inclusive and representative is imperative.
Congratulations to the Alliance for Excellent Education on a great collection!
Have you ever wondered who looks for openly licensed images? Or how those images are used? Before we launched CC Search in April 2019, we assumed that the search engine would serve three broad groups of creators:
Those making designs, imagery, and art
Those illustrating text, such as bloggers, journalists, or educators
Those creating videos
It’s been over a year since CC Search moved out of beta (we just celebrated its first birthday!), and we now have a better idea of who we serve and their needs thanks to user feedback and insights derived from anonymized data. We’re excited to share with you what we’ve learned!
Who are our users?
Thanks to extensive feedback and user interviews, we have a better sense of the broad groupings our core users fall into, including 1) educators, 2) students, 3) creators, 4) illustrators, or 5) professionals. By collecting examples indicating how CC-licensed content is used, we also have a clearer picture as to how these groups use the content they find and what they need from us to ensure an even better experience.
The Educator is someone who teaches, trains, or coaches at any level of schooling, from early childhood through adult education. They use CC Search to create or illustrate educational materials, such as presentations, handouts, worksheets, and videos. The Educator can be a creator, or an illustrator, but identifies as an educator first, and so the purpose and impact of their work is explicitly defined as for education. Approximately 30% of our users identify as educators. The size and impact of this group is deeply compelling as we structure our ongoing efforts.
The Student is most commonly someone who is instructed to use CC Search as part of a defined curriculum (such as Code.org) or as part of a class assignment. They are directed to CC Search when learning about copyright or creating something to turn in to their teacher. Teachers using CC Search tell us it is their first choice because they see it as the safest, most comprehensive collection of openly licensed images. Approximately 30% of our users identify as students. One user, a Digital Creativity Advisor at a university in the United Kingdom told us, “I use the Creative Commons search engine with students to help them find great resources for use in their digital artworks but also to help explain the tricky concepts behind Creative Commons licensing. I’m so glad it’s there to make both so much easier.”
The Creator is a musician getting cover art for their album or a filmmaker adding images to videos or a designer getting inspiration or material for adaptation. They’re not mainstream creators with large budgets, but rather artists pursuing passion projects. This group makes up about 10% of our users. We see this group as distinct from those with an explicit education focus.
The Illustrator is an author, writer, journalist, blogger, or editor who is looking for a visual accompaniment to a written work. They’re looking for something they can freely use for personal and professional projects alike, some of which may be commercial. About 10% of our users fall into this group.
The Professional is someone who is using CC Search for business purposes, most commonly for marketing materials, website assets, or merchandise creation. They need content that can be freely used for commercial purposes. The filter mechanisms on CC Search and clear explanations of license restrictions allow this group to reuse with great confidence. About 10% of our users fall into this group.
The remaining 10% or so of our users self-report as other types, often planning to use the work they’ve found for personal reasons, like social media backgrounds, internal decorations, or birthday cards.
While we’ve been able to broadly group our users, which helps us understand their needs and motivations, we’ve also learned that the use cases of openly licensed images are wider than we can possibly imagine or represent through these groupings. We find it particularly heartwarming when a grandparent reports that they are making a picture card for their grandchild and inspiring when a teacher shares a link to a slide deck being used for a history lesson. We’re sincerely grateful to the users who share with us how they’re using the images they find.
Where are they based?
Our goal is to serve a global audience, and we’re actively working to make CC Search more usable in languages besides English. Despite our current limitations, we’re thrilled to see that CC Search is crossing borders. Here are the top 10 countries that users access CC Search from:
United States (40%)
Israel (6%)
United Kingdom (4%)
Canada (4%)
Spain (3%)
Australia (3%)
Germany (3%)
Brazil (2%)
France (2%)
India (2%)
In total, we’ve had visitors from 200+ countries and territories. Over 65% of our users were searching in English, with Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Russian making up over 20% combined. Over the next few months, we’ll be working to internationalize CC Search so that we can more effectively serve the growing number of users from non-English speaking countries.
There are several ways we keep in touch with the users of CC Search. Some folks send us emails or submit feedback forms, while others chat with us on Twitter or through our Community Slack. Which we welcome you to join! We also have a standing invitation for user interviews to help improve the usability of CC Search and other products we’re building. Our favorite conversations are with users, as we work to understand their pain points and collect candid feedback. These conversations inform what features we focus our efforts on.
In recent months, we’ve had the chance to dig into the myriad of ways that openly licensed images are used, what other types of content would be useful to our current users, and what users miss most about the old search portal for CC-licensed content. We’re happy to report that we’re working on meeting the needs of those who want other sources of content and other types of content.
We’ll soon be rolling out a meta-search feature, both for additional image sources as well as audio and video. This will look familiar to those users who’ve used the old search portal to confidently put the necessary filters in place before searching for CC-licensed content on the broader web. This new feature will allow for a quick jump to results from the likes of Google Images, SoundCloud, YouTube, and more directly from the CC Search interface. We’re also working hard to prepare for the indexing and discovery of CC-licensed audio, which we expect we’ll be able to support by the end of 2020—stay tuned!
To stay up-to-date on the technical updates that we’ll be making to CC Search throughout 2020, be sure to follow Creative Commons Open Source on Twitter, join #cc-usability in the Creative Commons Slack, or keep an eye on the Active Sprint and Backlog in GitHub! If you want to share your thoughts on CC Search with us directly, fill out this feedback form or schedule a user interview with one of our team members. We’d be thrilled to hear from you!
: Featured image has icons by Valerie Lamm from the “Person” collection licensed CC BY via Noun Project.
Creative Commons is excited to announce the publication of the Romanian language translations of version 4.0 of the CC License Suite and of the CC0 public domain dedication. These translations will enable approximately 30 million people to understand our licenses in their first or second language!
We could not be more pleased to see this effort reach a successful conclusion after one year of collaboration among experts from the European Commission. The translations were provided by official translators of the European Commission, coordinated by Pedro Malaquias (Legal Officer – Intellectual Property). The translations were reviewed by George Hari Popescu, our Translation Assistant.
The translations followed the guidelines set in the 3.0 version and kept the same translations for most of the legal words and phrases. The most important change in the 4.0 version is for the word “Share.” The 4.0 suite is an exact translation of the English original version, without adaptations to national laws. Since “Distribuire” is a word used in the Romanian copyright law, the word “Partajare” was chosen for the 4.0 version.
Over 300 million images are uploaded to Facebook a day. Yes, just Facebook. Once other social media and photo-sharing platforms like Flickr, Unsplash, Instagram, etc. are taken into account, that number quickly grows into the billions.
A lot has changed since the dawn of photography in the 19th century—when Nicéphore Niépce (a.k.a. the “Father of Photography”) peered through his camera obscura from his upstairs window in France and created the oldest surviving photographic image in 1826. At that time, and for over a century, photography was restricted to (primarily white and Western) wealthy hobbyists and career professionals. However, photography has become more democratized, digitized, and open over time. This process began in the 1940s with Kodak’s “Brownie” camera, then quickened with the invention of the digital camera in the late 1980s, and finally culminated with the smartphone in the early 2000s. In 2019, the Pew Research Center estimated that 1/3rd of the world’s population has a smartphone. This means that billions of people have access to a camera!
Niépce’s “View from the Window at Le Gras” (1826 or 1827), the world’s oldest surviving photographic image, made using a camera obscura. Original plate (left) by Niépce; colorized reoriented enhancement (right) by Nguyen. Licensed CC BY-SA.
Along with the democratization and digitization of photography came the rise of open licensing (the CC License Suite was first released in 2002) and “free” photo-sharing and stock photography websites (Flickr was founded in 2004). Although these trends have many benefits, they’ve generally made professional photographers feel uneasy. As photographer and filmmaker Erin Jennings wrote in a 2019 essay, “Not only has accessible digital photography threatened the commercial photography industry, it has also thrown into question the very self-worth of many photographers whose identities were mired in the exclusivity of the analog process.” As a photographer, I understand this uneasiness as well as the apprehension that comes with publishing images under open licenses. I’ve certainly wondered: Is it OK that I’m willingly handing organizations and companies the ability to use my work for “free”? Will this lead to the expectation that photography should always be free? Does this devalue professional photography?
Along with the democratization and digitization of photography came the rise of open licensing and “free” photo-sharing and stock photography websites; although these trends have many benefits, they’ve also made professional photographers feel uneasy.
Luke Beard, Photographer and Designer; CEO and Founder of Exposure.
Over time, I’ve learned more about the purpose of open licenses and the rights photographers are guaranteed under them.For instance, the attribution requirement under CC licenses can actually help maintain the connection between photograph and photographer because the photographer’s name must be attributed if their work is reused. In the age of image theft and image overload, that’s significant. The range of licenses available also gives photographers more freedom to determine how their photography can be used beyond “all rights reserved,” and clarify that to potential users. For up-and-coming photographers, this can be especially useful for building a personal brand and an audience of potential clients. Personally, I try to always openly license my work—something I recently learned was possible on Exposure, a storytelling platform for photographers and visual storytellers. After using the platform for years, it was a pleasant surprise to learn that the company had enabled CC BY-ND as a licensing option. It also made me curious: Why did a platform that serves as a creative outlet for professional photographers and storytellers decide to allow open licensing as an option?
To find out, I contacted Exposure Founder and CEO Luke Beard via email. A photographer himself, I also wanted to know his personal thoughts about open licensing and the democratization of photography. Our conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
VH: The growing democratization of photography has led to a plethora of images online, primarily through free photo-sharing and stock photography websites. Has this trend impacted your identity as a professional photographer? Do you think it’s harming the industry?
LB: I’d argue that Instagram has done more to change photography in the last decade than legacy and fledgling photo communities built around free sharing or stock [photography]. Instagram has a fairly large conversion rate. Its scale, reach, and impact on photography still feels unprecedented. It’s effectively one of the biggest stewards of the medium the world has ever seen.
The “professional photographer” part of my identity has a strong feeling around giving anything away for “free.” There are both potentially good and potentially negative outcomes, but it also depends on the context. You certainly learn a lot about what feels right or worth it by exploring free avenues. The communities that grow around services like Flickr can be incredible, and I’m sure many working photographers today got their start there. The proliferation of ways to discover photography though free, stock, or sharing [platforms] has certainly raised the bar both competition-wise and creativity-wise, and I’d say it has been a net positive.
VH: There’s an ongoing debate within photography circles about open licensing and whether or not it harms professional photographers. What do you see as the benefits and drawbacks?
LB: The value of photography has simultaneously been raised and lowered as the internet economy has grown. As a visual medium—with amazing screens in the hands of ~3.5 billion people—photography has so much to offer for the foreseeable future.
Exposure houses creative works from individual photographers, non-profit organizations, governments, and more.
Open licensing also has a lot to offer photographers who are looking for new and interesting ways to share their craft and earn work. On the one hand, you have platforms with a huge reach that take on the hard work of distributing and hosting your photos in exchange for an open license (e.g. Unsplash). The long-tail upside might be that someone thinks your style of photography is perfect and hires you for a shoot. The flip side is that free and openly licensed photos may lose all concept that there is a photographer behind the photo. This devalues both the photographer and the photo. I personally struggle with the idea of normalizing good photography as something that has no cost or doesn’t require credit—although, it’s important to point out that CC licenses do require attribution. A comparison would be this one: it’s hard to make good software, but free applications normalize the idea that software should cost nothing.
There is still lots of work to be done to reap the benefits of open licensing, and the majority of this work falls to the stewards of the platforms and tools.
Without openly licensed photos, however, we wouldn’t have visually rich Wikipedia pages or great collections like NASA’s image gallery. For individual photographers, I think there still has to be a better way. Maybe the answer is a blockchain solution through micropayments or maybe just a better marketplace platform. There is still lots of work to be done to reap the benefits of open licensing, and the majority of this work falls to the stewards of the platforms and tools. I’m hopeful the benefits will greatly outweigh the negatives.
VH: Can you explain why Exposure decided to offer an open licensing option and if there were any specific challenges when making and implementing that decision?
We have taken baby steps into offering an open license as a feature. For context, it’s a toggle you can switch “on” or “off” for specific stories. As the creator, you agree to a CC BY-ND license for your photography within that story. This idea initially came about because we wanted to give Exposure members the ability to allow their family, friends, or clients to download their photos. Since the launch, however, we have seen it used for academic and non-profit purposes too, so we plan on expanding it this year by adding more licenses and the ability to license entire stories (including written content) and not just the individual photos. Our non-profit customers have expressed how helpful this would be to share their cause.
VH: Does Exposure educate users on this open licensing option or advertise it in any way?
The photo downloads feature is advertised as a paid feature because there is an infrastructure cost associated with allowing photos to be downloaded. When the feature is enabled by the member, we give a full legal description of how the license works and also a “basic” description in simpler terms. When a visitor downloads any photo that is under the open license they also see a similar dialog and download agreement that indicates the requirements of the license, including attribution to the photographer/source. This way, they know how and where they can use the photo before they actually download it.
An example of Exposure’s Download Agreement and use of CC BY-ND. Source: “The Space People” by Victoria Heath (CC BY-ND).
VH: Taking a step back from open licensing, can you share with us one or two of the most impactful stories that have been shared on your platform?
That’s a tough one, as there have been thousands over the years, but right now I’m extra proud to host and share stories on climate change, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, this story from Doctors without Borders (MSF) which shares the struggle to get the supplies needed to fight COVID-19 in Yemen; this piece by the United Nations Development Programme’s Climate Office telling the story of climate-resilient farming and food security in the outer islands of Kiribati; and this story of Black Lives Matter protests in Cobb County, Georgia by a local photographer.
VH: The goal of the open movement is to build a more equitable, inclusive, and innovative world through sharing—do you believe sharing photography, and creative content more broadly, has a role in achieving that goal?
Openly sharing information has always happened within communities. I strongly believe the open movement has achieved great things since the first few days of ARPANET and the birth of the modern internet. Creative content still has room to mature to be a truly accessible, inclusive, and equitable medium as more people get access to the internet. But as a whole, visual content has had a huge impact by engaging most of the world—now more than any other time in history. There are things that worry me about our ability to achieve any sort of “open web” goal, these include the consolidated power of “Big Tech,” eroding net neutrality, and the disparity of access to reliable and affordable (if not free) internet connections—as recently seen with the impact of COVID-19 on students without a reliable internet connection at home.
VH: Photography as a profession has suffered from a lack of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity which has led to a mirrored lack of diversity in the images created (e.g. stock photos). What actions do you think individual photographers like yourself, and platforms like Exposure, can take to help increase diversity in the industry?
A quote mentioned in Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist has recently been very impactful in my thinking about just this. The quote is credited to Harry A. Blackmun from the 1978 Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Blackmun wrote, “…in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”
There is no progress without change and the status quo of taking a neutral stance does not allow for oppressed voices to be heard.
When I think about how this could be implemented in photography and the platforms that support it, I see several paths to a more equitable community: actively raising, promoting, and empowering the work of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and gender diverse photographers; giving resources to those same communities to enhance their ability to work, and; public platforms taking a zero-tolerance policy for hate speech and racism of any kind. There is no progress without change and the status quo of taking a neutral stance does not allow for oppressed voices to be heard. Exposure, as a platform, can do more on all these fronts, but the future looks bright for more giving and more empowering initiatives. Our Black Lives Matter support statement outlines what we are doing right now, and there is more to come in the future.
VH: Luke, thank you for speaking with me! By the way, there are a growing number of openly licensed collections that are working to increase diversity in stock photography. These include Nappy, the Gender Spectrum Collection, Disabled and Here Collection, and Women in Tech. Check them out!
Did you know that the Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) consists of 43 CC Country Chapters? Spread across the globe, these CC Chapters are the home for a community of advocates, activists, educators, artists, lawyers, and users who share CC’s vision and values. They work to implement and strengthen open access policies, copyright reform, open education, and open culture in the communities in which they live.
To help showcase their work, we’re excited to introduce our blog series and social media initiative: CC Network Fridays. At least one Friday a month, we’ll travel around the world through our blog and on Twitter (using #CCNetworkFridays) to a different CC Chapter, introducing their teams, discussing their work, and celebrating their commitment to open!
First up is CC Italy!
The CC Italian Chapter was formed in December 2018. Its Chapter Lead and representative to the CC Global Network Council is lawyer Deborah De Angelis. From the beginning, the Chapter has been involved in many fields of the open movement but over the last year, in particular, it has enhanced its activities covering almost all CCGN Platforms. To learn more about their work, we reached out to CC Italy to ask a few questions. They responded in both English and Italian!
CC: What open movement work is your Chapter actively involved in? What would you like to achieve with your work?
CC Italy: The Italian Chapter is involved in advocating for CC licenses, in the process of the DSM Directive implementation in Italy, and has formed an Open GLAM group and an Open Education group. Our goal is to achieve more openness and the widespread adoption of CC licenses in Italy.
Il Capitolo italiano divulga le licenze CC, è coinvolto nel processo di implementazione della Direttiva DSM e recentemente ha costituito al suo interno due gruppi di lavoro, uno dedicato all’Open GLAM e uno dedicato all’Open Education.
CC: What exciting project has your Chapter engaged in recently?
CC Italy: The Chapter participated in the hearing at the Italian Senate for the DSM Directive implementation. It is working on a common appeal for the free re-use of cultural heritage images in the European Union and writing a proposal to the Italian Ministry for the Open Education policies implementation.
Il Capitolo italiano ha partecipato alle audizioni al Senato per l’implementazione della Direttiva DSM. Attualmente sta lavorando ad un appello per il libero riuso delle immagini dei beni culturali nell’Unione Europea e ad una proposta indirizzata al Ministero italiano dell’Istruzione e dell’Università e della ricerca per l’implementazione di politiche di Open education.
CC: What projects in your country are using CC licenses that you’d like to highlight?
You can find some Italian private and public organizations that share their works with CC licenses, here. We would like to mention that the National and Central Library of Rome (not present in the list above) shares its digital content under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Potete trovare qui alcune realtà italiane pubbliche e private che condividono le proprie opere con le licenze CC. Vorremmo citare anche la Biblioteca nazionale Centrale di Roma (non presente nell’elenco) tra coloro che condividono i propri contenuti digitali con licenza CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
CC: What do you find inspiring and rewarding about your work in the open movement?
CC Italy: We strongly believe in the importance of sharing knowledge and culture in order to create a fairer world through a democratic and safe digital space. We work very hard for this purpose and we are rewarded by every small step forward we’re able to achieve.
Crediamo fortemente che la condivisione della cultura e della conoscenza siano fondamentali per la creazione di un mondo più equo anche attraverso uno spazio digitale sicuro e democratico. Lavoriamo molto in questa direzione e ci sentiamo pienamente ricompensati da ogni passo avanti che riusciamo a raggiungere con il nostro lavoro.
CC: What are your plans for the future?
CC Italy: The future is now! We are deeply involved in so many projects and we really hope to achieve even just a part of our goal, and to enlarge and strengthen the Italian CC community. For updates about the CC Italian Chapter’s activities, visit our website or contact us!
Il futuro è adesso! Stiamo lavorando su tantissimi progetti e speriamo di raggiungere anche solo una parte dei nostri obiettivi e di ingrandire e rafforzare la comunità italiana di Creative Commons. Per aggiornamenti sulle attività del Capitolo italiano CC, visita il nostro sito Web o contattaci!
Thank you to the CC Italy team, especially Laura Sinigaglia and Deborah de Angelis for contributing to the first CC Network Fridays feature, and for all of their work in the open community! To see this conversation on Twitter, click here. To become a member of the CCGN, visit our website!
: Featured image has icons by 
We could not be more pleased to see this effort reach a successful conclusion after one year of collaboration among experts from the European Commission. The translations were provided by official translators of the European Commission, coordinated by Pedro Malaquias (Legal Officer – Intellectual Property). The translations were reviewed by George Hari Popescu, our Translation Assistant.
