Executive Summary: Do not use Creative Commons at all if you want to retain all rights to your work. Creative Commons always means giving up some part of your copyright.


And now the long story. Actually, there's other stuff I want to say, including a lengthy feature session that I just can't get the energy to write, but this one has been nagging at me since forever. Many artists here take their copyright seriously, but a large subset of them then goes and does something completely unhelpful thanks to a lack of information. Just now, I've read a news post titled "Protect Your Work, COPYRIGHT YOURSELF.". The title makes no sense at all and the actual text only gets worse - hence my not linking to it. So I thought I'd clear up some common issues.

Copyright by default
If you just put your picture up here and absolutely ignore the "Creative Commons" section of the upload form, then you get full copyright protection. You don't have to put a © Myself 2009 or something in the description, because it's not actually required by US law anymore (it never was in most other countries), and because DeviantART actually puts one of those below the image for you already automatically. There is nothing else you have to do to get copyright protection, anything in the artists comments, your journal and so on is just to make yourself feel better.

There are exceptions to your copyright that way. Most importantly, you grant DA a license to store your image and show it to others here, which should be pretty obvious, but it's better worth noting. You explicitly grant this license by leaving the little checkbox at the bottom checked. Since DA is in the USA, there is also the issue of Fair use, which allows others to use your work for very specific purposes, and is granted by US federal law. Finally, if you offer prints you are obviously allowing DA to print your work and sell it.

So, if you do nothing, then except for these few items, all your rights are reserved and other people can't copy or modify your images and put them anywhere legally, unless you allow them to.

Creative Commons
Creative Commons means voluntarily giving up some part of these rights. You'll find that under a CC-licensed image, the automatically generated line from DA changes from "All rights reserved" to "Some rights reserved". Still, there are many pictures on DA which are licensed with some Creative Commons license, and have the line "All rights reserved, do anything with this and burn in hell" in the artist's comments. Copyright-wise, it's now unclear how much protection you actually want - all of it (as the artist's comments say) or some of it (as the license says)? So, while checking the box that says "I want a creative commons license, please!" sounds all official and giving you more rights, it really does the opposite.

Which rights are you going to lose? Well, as soon as you say yes to CC here, everybody else gets the right to take your picture, unaltered, and publish it elsewhere for free, as long as you get proper attribution. The other two switches should be pretty obvious: If you allow commercial use, then others are free to make money from it as well, and you can choose whether you allow others to modify the image, or only modify it if they release the modified image under the same license.

Why do that? Mainly because it allows other people to take your work and make it better. If you allow it, it happens more frequently than you'd think (and I still have one or two from others that I have to post...).* I think it's a great idea to use Creative Commons for this purpose, but don't use it if you don't want this or don't know what it is.

Final note about stock images
You may have noticed that Creative Commons sounds like it was made for use by stock accounts and the like. Well, it is. If you are posting stock images somewhere, I'd really recommend that you don't put your own list of conditions, but rather use an appropriate CC license. This makes life easier for everyone, since it means images with the same license can easily be mixed for whatever purpose the manipulator has in mind. Creative Commons can't implement some common restrictions (use only on DA, note me when used, the like), but on the other hand it makes your work useful for much more people. If you want, you can still issue these restrictions as requests instead.

*) As a note to all of those who want to do this on my photos (and only photos): Feel free to do so, and you can post the result on Flickr or here in your own account and even make money from them, as long as you credit me (e.g. give a link to the original image) and select the same license as I did, which is the "Attribution-ShareAlike" version. On DA that means, from top to bottom in the Creative Commons pop-up window "Yes", "Yes" and "Yes, as long as others share alike".