This BBC news article today about a man who discovered that pictures of his amputated leg had been used in ads without his consent may help to illustrate one of the problems with pushing for OA with ubiquitous licensing. I have no idea if the image was CC licensed or not; that is not the point, rather the point is to give more thought to the implications of re-use. In brief, with such images other rights are often involved besides copyright, such as privacy and publicity rights.
Article here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49029845 If researchers and publishers use CC licenses that actively invite re-use of material, they increase the chances of situations like this for human subjects. Researchers in Canada have an ethical obligation to protect human subjects; I submit that this is reason to avoid open licensing with such material. People who have consented to participate in a weight loss study have not consented to have their photos used in targeted advertising to their friends on social media by weight loss companies. I argue that a weight loss company would have good reason to interpret CC-BY as an invitation to this kind of downstream commercial use. This is also a legal risk for researchers, their employers, publishers and policy-makers who require open licensing, because a problematic downstream re-user could use the open license as a defence. This could start a chain of lawsuits (I thought this was ok because CC-BY: sue author; author used CC-BY because advised or required to do so by journal or policy-maker, author sues journal or policy-maker...) It is naive to think that a blanket invitation to re-use material from scholarly works will be used exclusively or even primarily for the purposes of advancing knowledge. Common uses of material such as images of people in social media include (along with many beneficial uses) cyberbullying, doxing, revenge porn, targeted advertising, posting, re-posting and tagging photos without permission, and altering photos without permission, to name a few not-so-social uses of new media. I wish we lived in a world where mutual respect and consideration could be taken for granted. Today, it is not clear that we can expect this standard even from elected leaders. For human subjects, it is not much to ask that we take the small step of avoiding attaching licenses granting blanket downstream re-use rights to anyone, to reduce the risk of harm and to make it as easy as possible to use legal remedies to stop harm, should this be necessary. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706
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