Flickr, Photos and CC-By

A couple of my photos are apparently going to be used in a children’s book in Japan; I’ve been contacted by someone asking for permission to use them for that purpose.

The funny thing is, almost all of my photos on Flickr are CC-By; I merely ask for attribution. I don’t even need to be notified. I set it up this way because I didn’t want to keep taking the time to deal with requests to use my photos…but it doesn’t seem to slow that down any. The CC-By photos get a great deal of inclusion on blogs and such, but I think that’s mostly by people who wouldn’t have bothered with them at all, otherwise.

Here’s the other funny thing…Despite the photos being CC-By, there’s usually some kind of compensation available. Nearly every request I’ve had included either an offer for some explicit number if my photo were chosen out of their working set, or there was a tentative query wanting to know how much I might require.

Strange as it is, CC-By isn’t serving my purpose for making the photos less of a hassle, and it also doesn’t appear to be changing the economics around the use of my photos, either.