Some years ago I did two small documentaries about the master classes of Milcho Leviev and Raina Kabaivanska at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. Besides the video equipment, I also took my photo camera to make some shots for my personal archive during the breaks. After all, I don’t meet opera divas and jazz maestros every day.

I published some of the photos online and as usual, I applied a Creative Commons license to them prohibiting commercial use but allowing free sharing. There wasn’t much interest in them so far but today I got a letter from a Wikipedia editor about one of the photos. He wanted to use it for the article about Milcho Leviev on Wikipedia.

I’ve read the conditions by Wikipedia regarding the contribution of images before and frankly, as much as I love the site (I am also registered as an editor), I didn’t like them. They use the same GPL license under which they license the text content, which means that you have to give up all your rights and literary declare your contribution as public domain. However, while I have no problem sharing my images, I definitely have a problem when someone else receives the right to profit from them without at least giving me a percentage for my time and efforts.

The editor that contacted me was apparently aware of the license conflict, so he “advised” me to change my current CC license to a different type, allowing commercial use. Part of his argument:

Wikipedia media should be as “free” as Wikipedia’s content — both to keep Wikipedia’s own legal status secure as well as to allow for as much re-use of Wikipedia content as possible.

Although I certainly appreciate this stance, my understanding about “free” certainly does not include the adjective “commercial” in it. Because the act of selling implies a restriction by itself - you can’t have what is to be sold unless you are willing to pay for it. Which brings up the question to whom I contribute my work - is it the user of Wikipedia or some company that crawls the web searching for images which can be simply sold for profit? Being a freelancer, I don’t own an online store where I can compete with this company if we both decide to sell our images, so suddenly, I am not only allowing others to profit, I literary dash out my chances to get some revenue for my efforts and boost my chances to simply observe other people taking advantage of what I created myself. If this is the ultimate freedom, please chain me now!

No need to mention I declined the invitation, explaining my point of view but the editor wrote back suggesting that:

a few carefully placed images by photographers can spur interest in their work, interest they might not have found expressed had they not decided to publish their content on the site

And this is where the sharing idea totally died. If I, or anybody else, were about to use Wikipedia only as some sort of an advertising platform, is this fair regarding the “free” ideal? Certainly this type of strategic fishing for clients can get you long ways in certain circumstances, although I wouldn’t exactly use Wikipedia as a platform. Because although it is the 8th most visited site on the web, my chances of being noticed there as a photographer are nearly as many as in Google search. And noticing is only half of the process - the people who do should be actually interested in photography. All this combined equals almost no advantage whatsoever.

There is another aspect, too. GPL was constructed with software in mind and software, in its most widespread kind, is a team product. A software library issued under GPL can’t be compared with a photo library with the same license because subprograms are rarely sold (if at all) as final products while single photos are. There should be a distinction between software and artworks because they don’t belong to the same basket and some services are acknowledging that fact. So should Wikipedia, if it is about to become a reliable host of really free media, in my humble opinion.

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