Why Do People Release Their Work Under Creative Commons or Public Domain?
I've always wondered what drives artists and creators to publish some of their works under permissive licenses, such as Creative Commons or Public Domain. It's pretty incredible that there are so many royalty-free resources out there, especially for people who are just starting out with blogging or video production. Great initiatives such as Pixabay and Wikimedia only exist because someone decided to give away their time and effort for free.
Why Give Away Your Work For Free?
I personally think that people share their work under permissive licenses for many different reasons. Some people might have a truly philanthropic mindset, which drives them to share their work with the world for free. In other cases, releasing part of your repertoire might serve as a great portfolio.
One thing that I am sure of, is that they're probably not doing it for the money. It's true that artists might receive some donations through Pixabay or other platforms, but I highly doubt that it's enough to make a living.
Supporting Creators Who Release Under Creative Commons
Over the past few months, I've started to realize how easy it is to find royalty-free images for my blog posts. That's part of the reason why I've started to send some Pixabay creators some small donations whenever I use their images.
Of course, you can't possibly send everyone money, so I just tend to send around 5 or 10 dollars from time to time. I really hope that I'm not the only one who's doing this, otherwise those artists might not care to release under Creative Commons next time.
Some questions for my readers:
- Do you often use royalty-free media for your content?
- Have you ever donated to some of these artists? Or do you plan to do so? (Don't worry if you don't!)
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I have started to contribute to the creative commons this year because as a digital artist...I really value all of the quality resources that become the foundation of many of my projects. I struggle to give direct monetary donations and so making my own resources available is one way to 'balance the scales' and give back...at least until I can afford to do more. Public domain content is so amazing and I could not do without...but it's not very collaborative. With the CC license it's a lot more likely that I will get to see the transformations...and make connections with other artists. And the way that I see it...with a foundation of free content to initially attract people the services and content that are for sale can be more easily trusted and are easier to advertise. Everyone needs to make a living but the balance between give and take is a tricky one...and too much take won't do you any favors in the long run!
Wow that's really cool that you have that kind of mindset! More people should think that way, it's always neat to see many different adaptations of your work. If you release your work under Creative Commons, do you exclude commercial use?
Maybe it is because they already have a full-time job and they do CC0 as their passion. In that case, they will not expect anything in return. If there are people who are fully dependent on the donations they receive, they really need to be supported. Nice article.
I think that's probably why most people do it. Or to have some sort of portfolio, before they start working for customers?
Yes, that could be possible. You can take me as an example. I work on a full-time job as a Lead Application Developer. My role in my job is to manage my team and assign tasks to them. It's kind of management and functional role. But I don't sit and code anything much. But I do lots of community projects off-work. In those community project, I do lots of coding and I develop apps and the reason is I'm passionate about it. And I don't charge for most of my community projects. Maybe others are also doing it this way. :)
As you said it could even be like a training for them before they work with actual customers.
Yep, I think so too. It is great to be a good artist, but people also have to find you. Showing your work on a platform that is used by a lot of people could do the trick.
Getting paid for free supplied stuff is hard. It is the same with WordPress plugins available on wordpress.org
If you are lucky, as a programmer, someone will ask you to adjust your free plugin to their needs. In that case you earn some money. In most cases people do not want to pay for what they feel is free stuff. WordPress itself is free, why would you have to pay for a small plugin?
I do donate, from time to time, wikipedia, wordpress, gimp, wordpress plugin programmers, FireFox addon programmers. If everyone pays a small amount, developers will keep developing the tool, or art or whatever.
Instead of paying, most people only complain when it stops working.
Luckily there are other people too, who understand it takes time and effort to create something and everyone has bills to pay.
With the free wordpress plugins, they usually have a premium version of those plugins as well. You don't really have that option for images and music. Thanks for the comment!
Sometimes they do. With images they will show you a small version, or a version with watermark. And with music they only share a fragment.
In general, whatever you put on the internet is for grabs.
I'm familiar with the premium concept of the WordPress plugins. Never used it for my own plugins though. Too much trouble. I have a collection I sell, and there is a collection that is free to use. Less money earned, but also less trouble :)
Food for thought @daan. I don’t use the free pixs a lot but it is a lovely gesture to donate to the artists.
maybe they want to give a job for free because they want to find a name first. I think it's like that.
Great write-up...