Las penas del Agente Smith

El título de la historia original que leí ayer siguiendo un enlace en el blog de Creative Commons me gustó tanto que he decidido mantenerlo para este artículo.

Es la historia de un periodista llamado Andrew Heavens, establecido en Adis Abeba, que descubrió lo que ocurría cuando le ponía una licencia Creative Commons a las imágenes que no había vendido a ningún medio. Hablando de las reveltas ocurridas en Etiopía tras las elecciones de Mayo del año pasado:

Then two things happened – one huge and historic, the other small and not so historic.

The big event was the violence that followed Ethiopia’s national elections in May last year. […]

I took some photos of the elections, then of the protests, the dead and the injured. Some of the photos ended up with Reuters. Without thinking about it too much, I posted the rest on Flickr.

The second, much smaller event was a passing comment from Ethan Zuckerman of GlobalVoices and … My Heart’s In Accra. It was a long story, but it ended with him suggesting that I should consider using a Creative Commons license. Again, without thinking too much about it, I made the necessary quick changes to the blog and my Flickr page.

[…]

On the personal side, lots of good things have come out of the fact that my cast-off photos are swimming around the internet with a CC license attached. People have written in checking to see if they can use them in textbooks, calendars, Ethiopian restaurant menus, novelty Amharic greeting cards. (How often do you get the chance to illustrate a line of novelty Amharic greeting cards?) Some of these contacts have resulted in further paid work. Some have resulted in the offer of free food if I am ever passing through New York and want to pop in to a certain Ethiopian restaurant. Others have resulted in nothing financial at all.

Lots of good things have also happened beyond the personal side. As I said earlier, one of the most frustrating things about press photography is the short lifespan of your photographs. You put yourself in a risky situation to record what you consider to be an important, newsworthy event. The resulting pictures flash up on newspaper pages, TV screens and Yahoo! News for a day or so. And then they disappear.

The greatest thing that Creative Commons does is give you work an extra lease of life. After the news event has passed on, the photographs are still out there, waiting for someone else to pick up on them, give them a new meaning and use them in a different setting.

En resumidas cuentas, cuando le das a la gente permiso para que utilice los contenidos que tú mismo creas (y te deshaces de los intermediarios - en este caso, las agencias de noticias) lo que ocurre es que (y todavía a estas alturas alguien se sorprenderá) la gente los utiliza: los guarda, los modifica, los reusa, crea sobre ellos. No sólo eso, sino que al haber prescindido de mediadores, los beneficios, sean del tipo que sean, no quedan mutilados por el camino.

Y eso, a Noviembre de 2006, todavía hay que explicárselo a mucha gente.