Festival uses CC-licensed pic without attribution, pays the price

A CC-licensed photo that was incorrectly used in an Italian festival's promotional materials has led to a public apology by the organisers for not respecting the terms of the licence, and the reimbursement of legal costs incurred.

The picture in question was taken by Niccolò Caranti, who is a professional photographer and an active member of the Wikipedia community—nearly 900 of his images are available on Wikimedia Commons. The photo was used by the Festival delle Resistenze 2016, held in Trentino-Alto Adige, in northern Italy.

Journalist Federico Rampini was one of the guest speakers at the festival, and the image used for all the promotional material was a photo of him taken by Caranti, which had been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence. This particular variant allows the image to be used freely for any purpose on the condition that it includes attribution and releases it under the same or a similar licence. However, neither condition was respected in the festival's publicity materials.

Caranti's lawyer Simone Aliprandi—an expert in the area of Creative Commons licensing—sent a cease and desist order to the organisers of the festival. As a post on the Wikimedia Commons blog explained: "After some discussion, the two came to a settlement which paid Caranti and his legal costs, along with a correction/public apology."

Both the apologies—one from the festival itself, and the other from the agency that organised Rampini's participation—note that the failure to respect the CC licence was a result of a mistake by the agency. Writing on his blog, Aliprandi said: "instead of providing to [the event organisers] Young Inside a picture from their archives, [the agency] sent the one made by Caranti taking it it from the Web."

The Wikimedia blog post pointed out that this isn't the first time that CC-licensed photos have been misused in this way. In 2013, Wikimedian Sage Ross found that his photos of Aaron Swartz were being used in news articles around the world: "Of the 42 news articles he examined, only six followed the licence at least in part. Another nine attributed him but not the licences, nine attributed them to a for-profit photo agency, and a final eighteen provided no attribution at all."

Caranti said he hopes that the public apologies he obtained "will help clarify that 'free licence' is not the same thing as 'public domain'; it does not mean 'you can do whatever you want without conditions'."

Listing image by Terrasque CC BY-SA 3.0