July 1, 2006
How do you attribute someone who doesn't give his name?
A few weeks ago a coworker came to me with a conundrum: he was writing an academic paper and needed a picture of a certain kind of cloud to illustrate a point he was making. He used the Creative Commons search engine and found an image on Flickr.com that both fit his needs and was released under a license that only required that he give attribution to the photographer. Only one problem: the photographer's Flickr page didn't list his real name or contact info anywhere. Just a handle... "Cyberdude," or something like that.
If he was just using this photo to illustrate a blog entry, my coworker would probably have just said "Photo curtsey of Cyberdude" and with a link to this guy's Flickr page, but there was no way he was going to say that in a professional academic paper. He could have created a Flickr account and left a comment asking for permission and the photographer's real name, but that's the kind of effort to gain permission that Creative Commons licenses were specifically designed to avoid. No doubt the photographer didn't list any contact info to avoid spammers or stalkers, but that need conflicts with the needs specified by his license. A Catch-22.
Posted by bug to Intellectual Property at July 1, 2006 8:52 AM | TrackBackYour co-worker needs to get their academic head out of their clouds. (Or something other than the clouds, if we're going to be fussy.) The correct, ethical and logical thing to do is precisely "Photo under Creative Commons license from cyberdude@flickr.com" or "...from http://flickr.com/cyberdude" or whatever. There's nothing nonprofessional or nonacademic about that. Based on the information given, one can only assume that Cyberdude *is* their professional identity and they want to have photos licensed under that name: I sure as hell would get irritated if someone using one of my photos insisted on referencing it to my birth name rather than my chosen identifier because it was more 'academic'.
Posted by: Jopesche at July 2, 2006 12:12 AMthere was no way he was going to say that in a professional academic paper
Why not? It's a name; together with the URL it uniquely identifies the relevant person. Online identities are not necessarily any more fluid than meatspace ones, and it's up to Cyberdude to make sure the identity tracks to him (or her, or...) for any meatspace purpose. Before I dropped the nick, "sennoma" was all you needed to find me.
So what's the problem? My guess is that your coworker is just afraid someone will sneer, not that the handle is inadequate as an identifier.
Posted by: Bill Hooker at July 2, 2006 12:16 AMThere's nothing nonprofessional or nonacademic about that.
I have to beg to differ, at least in many accademic communities. I expect researchers that study phenomena like social spaces and online identity would be the most accepting of non-traditional citations, since well, they're soaking in it already. But in general I'd probably think less of an author who credited only a person's handle. It just smacks of someone who didn't care enough to bother hunting down the photographer's full name.
So what's the problem? My guess is that your coworker is just afraid someone will sneer, not that the handle is inadequate as an identifier.
I can't speak for my coworker (and I've no idea what the paper was for), but that would certainly be my reasoning.
Posted by: Bug at July 3, 2006 4:29 PM