March 29th, 2006, 3:44 pm

Citizen-generated content and permissions

Back when the London bombings hit, I was all on my soapbox about how newspapers should be going out and getting user-generated content when they wanted it — not just expecting it to come to them (read post).

I willfully didn’t acknowlege that newspaper.coms do have to worry about copyright infringement — and although many Flickr images are tagged with Creative Commons licenses that allow noncommercial use, many folks would consider a newspaper.com use commercial.

It’s admittedly a lot of manpower hours to figure out who’s cool with the usage, and who’s not.

How to get around this permissions conundrum?

Schmap.com came up with a smart way. schmap

Via a message on Flickr, I was directed to their website, where I was greeted with this nice interface. It clearly explained:

What Schmap was
Which of my images they wanted to use
How the images would be used, and how I’d be credited
Why I might object

… and provided a simple “yes” or “no” interface.

I decided OK — even though those are some of the WORST pictures I’ve ever taken — because I welcome exposure and traffic back to LauraFries.com.

I’ve no idea how this works, but it’d be a great model for a newspaper.com to put into place in order to easily and quickly secure permissions to use citizen-generated material on its site.