Just Because It’s Free, Doesn’t Mean It’s Yours

Yesterday I needed a photograph for a presentation about real estate. The picture I found was free, but its value went far beyond gold. It also changed my world view and along with millions of other images it’s helping to change the entire world.

Play along with me now on your own computer. Have you been to Flickr? This tiny start-up company is an online photo sharing site - and it did such a good job of sharing that Yahoo gobbled it up recently for, oh, several million times the GNP of Norway.

So, work with me on this. Take your little fingers over to Flickr.com. You’ll want to sign up if your don’t belong.

Signing up is free and allows you to contact the photographers, artists and average Joes who hang up their photos on this site.

Now, quickly, let’s get down to business. Assume that, like me, you need a real estate photo for a presentation, so let’s type the words “real estate” into the search box (we probably should have put that phrase in quotation marks - very sharp of you to notice).

Hidden Treasure Worth it’s Weight in Gold

The hidden treasure here is to start your search from the “Advanced Search” tab in Flickr. When you do that, you can look for only the Creative Commons licensed photos that can be used commercially.

What?!! Yes, it’s true, you can use the photographs you find this way in your brochures, PowerPoint and blogs without worrying about being hauled off by the police.

Now, this is really a story about the networking power of the Internet, so we don’t have much time to linger on Creative Commons. Suffice it to say that they are the largest organization in the world devoted to expanding the reach of creative works. They do this by deliberately sharing the rights to intellectual property - such as music, photos and medieval beer recipes.

Back to our search now. Mostly you will find the standard photographs of homes, decorations and slumlords. But, on the fourth page of results (third if you were smart enough to put “real estate” in quotation marks) you’ll find the photo that’s at the top of this blog article. It can be used, even in a commercial presentation, as long as attribution is given to the person who created the work.

So, who created it? Welcome to the “Gold Guy.” his name is Scott Maxwell and he creates these 3D figures in a software rendering program. His web site is Lumaxart.com (but you’ll want to click on the blog link when you get there).

Are all of his photos free? No. You see, Creative Commons, as we said, is a way for artists to expand the reach of their creative works. It works like this. Scott posts a nice selection of his images, giving you the right to use them. Think about it. What happens when he does this?

You’re right! Other people will see those same images and think, “Wow, I could use that in my presentation.”

In fact, we quickly introduced branding expert Dick Bruso of Heard Above the Noise to Scott’s “branding gold guys.” Dick’s working on his blog and web site right now and, who knows, he might just want to purchase a selection of Scott’s photos.

One kinda’ cool thing about the artists on Flickr who offer their work under Creative Commons license is the ability to write to them. I know, we’re weird, but we like to talk to the people whose work we admire or would like to use in our presentations.

So, of course, we wrote an email to Scott, and I am not making this up. At 6:00 AM our time in the Rocky Mountains, he wrote back right away from Hawaii! In fact, I was so intrigued by his strange little figures that I wrote right back to him. And, he wrote back to me again instantly.

Figure it out - if it’s early morning Mountain time, it’s the middle of the night in Hawaii. Says he works 18 hour days. Six days a week.

Then, I kid you not - our phone rang. It was Scott. He told us that he’d only placed his work with Creative Commons licenses about a month ago - and with some trepidation. “I’m the kind of person who aggressively pursues my copyright, so we didn’t make the decision lightly.”

We asked how it had worked out and he told us, “My sales have gone up 25% in that one month.” He went on to say, “It’s a back end route for full-fledged advertising, on Zero budget. It’s viral because other people distribute your work for you.”

And here’s why. We mentioned that Scott offers subscriptions to his images that are incredibly reasonably priced. But, Scott also offers the exclusive rights to custom-designed figures for amazingly low prices.

What does that mean to someone like Dick Bruso? It means that no one else could use anything Scott designs just for him. You see, that is one drawback of the free Creative Commons stuff and even the drawback of royalty free collections. You might see the same image in a dog food ad.

But, think about it. What is the name of Dick’s company again? Heard Above the Noise.

25% increase in sales - just for giving away a few free samples. I kinda’ like that kind of return on investment. You see, those Creative Commons folks aren’t just a bunch of nice guys. They also have a really savvy sense for business - and how it works in the new connected world.

Author Note: As always with any article, workbook or presentation, Sheryl and I do not accept referral or affiliate fees from any company or web site. We call ‘em like we see ‘em.