Copyright Policy

There is a delicate balance between participating in one’s culture and protecting one’s interests in making a livelihood from their work. As a professional photographer who also has spent a significant amount of time in the Open Source Software community, I’m very aware of the differences between sharing work for the greater good and having one’s work exploited for gain. I want to contribute to creative culture as much as I can, but I also want to ensure that I am compensated for commercial use of my photographic works.

Some of my published photographs are available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Photographs available under this license are clearly marked as such. When used under this license, attribution must be given as “James Duncan Davidson” alongside the image. When used online, or in media that supports hyperlinking, you must provide a link back to my site, http://duncandavidson.com as part of the attribution.

Commercial use licenses are available for most of my work. If you are interested in licensing my work for commercial purposes, please contact me for more information. Along with your request, please forward as many details about your proposed usage as possible, including geographic region of use and circulation size. These details will help me prepare a quote for your usage.

In no case do I surrender copyright or moral rights to my work for any amount of compensation.

Questions & Answers

You took a photograph of me at an event. Can I use it on my Facebook or Twitter profile? Sure! I’m all for people using the photographs I’ve made of them on their social network site profiles. I understand that it’s a bit hard to give attribution next to a profile photograph. Please make your best effort to attribute, but if you can’t, I’m OK with it in this particular usage scenario. Please let me know if you do use one of my photos on your profile so I can check it out!

You took a photograph of the CEO of my company. Can we use it on our company website? In this case, we’re talking about commercial use. The short answer is contact me. I’ll draw up a quick quote for the kind of use you want.

Can I use your photographs on Wikipedia? I get this question a lot, especially since I have taken an extensive number of photographs of luminaries in the technology community. Unfortunately, my answer is no. Wikipedia requires that images that appear on their site be licensed in a manner that permits unlimited reuse and redistribution, including for commercial purposes. The folks behind Wikipedia believe strongly in their principles and I respect them for that. Unfortunately their principles don’t quite align with mine on the topic of commercial versus non-commercial use, nor in the way they provide attribution. I wish I could contribute my photographs to Wikipedia, but I can’t without violating my own principles.

Why do you place restrictions on commercial use of your photographs when you were happy to release software under more liberal licenses, like the Apache Software Foundation license? That’s a good question. The quick answer is that it’s a matter of how the works are created. A photograph is usually created by one person. Commercial use doesn’t typically make a photograph better. On the other hand, software is usually a team endeavor. It turns out that in some cases, especially for the web server technologies I worked on, software gets better when more people use it and contribute improvements back to it. Software and photography are two very different kinds of creative works. Also, it’s important to note that I didn’t release all of my software under liberal licenses. I only did it in cases where the benefits were clear.