Adding value to your works using Creative Commons licenses

Back in 2007 I created an account on Flickr, without having a digital camera nor an interest in photography. When I bought my first digital camera a Kodak Z612 Zoom (a compact with 6.1 Mpixels resolution, manual control over the aperture and shutter speed, and 12X optical zoom) I started experimenting with the most impressive construction of my home city, the Rio - Antirrio "Charilaos Trikoupis" Bridge.

Since 2014 the only photograph with some visits was a shaken photo of a bench that looked similar with the Fourier transform of a square pulse. The traffic came from a tweet from Spiros Vathis, a great amateur photographer and mathematician.

#EPIC Παγκάκι Fourier Transformation (via @spyrosth) http://bit.ly/jdv0Ja

— Σπύρος Βάθης (@sVathis) 1 May 2011

When I decided to ditch copyright and to use Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license I just wanted to open my photos and to help the community of the CC expand.

What I did not expected was the traffic increase. Nothing changed in the next couple of months but after less than a year voilà(!) my photos suddenly started to get visits, comments and furthermore I got requests for printed editions.

A cute child playing at Wien St. Stephen's square attracted more than 29.000 visits.

A photo of three children fishing at the beach of Parga, Greece has more than 19.000 visits. The open license helped editors to use the photo without asking, just by giving the credits. The photo was used under CC in a blog here which was reproduced in another site, and in a different blog here.

A simple graffiti photo that I took back when I lived in Karlsruhe has more than 15.000 visits. The photo was chosen as the header of an article here, another article about marriage here, and I got a request to include the photo in a printed book, which I happily accepted.

The Attribution-NoDerivs license is not the most free license, it is a weird mix after all, but it is a good first step once you decide to ditch copyright. I chose No Derivative Works since it provides some rights about reproduction of your works, Attribution for obvious reasons, but I did not include Share Alike nor Non Commercial limitations. 

What is more important about the CC licenses, like all open projects, is the community. The publisher that contact me to ask if he could include my photo in a printed copyrighted and commercial book is just a kind member of the community, since the Attribution-NoDerivs license gives him the right to publish my photos in a copyrighted (since I do not use Share Alike) and commercial (since I do not use Non Commercial) book providing only credits and without altering my photo.