Playing with licenses

Image Licenses are not necessarily a complex subject. You can even play with the concept. Let's take a very practical approach:

Consider the portal Picasa. Picasa (www.picasa.com) is a google online portal where photo aficionados can upload their captures. Users can take pictures and backup them online. You can easily tag, order, share and even manipulate every item of your great picture collection.

Picasa allows the user to decide the license of their creations, you can do it in Settings -> Privacy and Permissions .

Here you can choose an appropiate license for yout photos. Here is a screenshot:

Figure1. Choosing a license in Picasa

In short, you have two options: All rights reserved or a CreativeCommons license:

• All right reserved

Wiht this license you retain all rights of your creation. It is a fair decission, for one thing you are the autor of the picture!

In this case, you can add the legend: ©All rights reserved.

What does that mean? If someone want to use your creation(for example, allocating your photo in their personal blog) needs to ask you for permission.

Every person o company that uses your photo without your permission can be sued.

May be you are asking, what is the point of this? Would not it be better to allow everybody to use all images? Well, it is your entire decission. If you want to allow

everybody to use your creation you can use other license (we will review theses licenses later), on the other hand if you want to retain all rights on your

creation you can do it. In theory (some authors disagree here )licenses provide authors with a greater incentive to create. This economic incentive fosters creation and innovation.

• Creative Commons licenses

Leave some rights of your images. Of course, there are some rights you can not renounce,

for example attribution: You are the author of this great picture, and no license can change this fact. But you can renounce to some other rights, for example, you can allow everybody to use your picture without asking permission. In this case you can tag the image with this legend. CreativeCommons(CC)

OK, after this introduction let's present a JavaFX app equivalent to the Picasa license page:

Figure 2. Click for full size

In order to execute the application click the following link

More on the next blog post!