This piece was also commissioned by Jiemian, but fittingly it was released under CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License) permission: as long as the author information (Hu Yilin / Jiemian Commentary) is clearly credited, it may be used free of charge.
On April 10, 2019, the first “black hole” photograph ever taken by humankind was released in a high-profile manner, attracting the world’s attention.
However, in China, beyond sparking people’s interest in black holes, this photo also detonated another topic. People noticed that the image had been included on a website called “Visual China,” and a copyright notice had been attached to it — “All rights reserved: 1995-2019© Visual China.” Some busybodies even found images of the national flag and national emblem on “Visual China” that were likewise being promoted as copyrighted. Public opinion erupted at once, and even the Communist Youth League Central Committee joined the chorus of condemnation.
“Visual China” quickly took down the controversial images such as the national flag, but the black hole page remained. Could it really have the confidence to hold copyright in the black hole photo, without fearing that astronomers would come after them for settlement?
So, to whom does the copyright in the black hole photo actually belong? If we want to use this photo, whom exactly do we need to ask for authorization?
Intellectual property must be respected
First of all, we really should recognize that the need for authorization in order to use images is, in fact, perfectly natural. In the past, Chinese people had a weak sense of copyright, and one could simply search the web for all kinds of pictures and insert them into one’s own webpage or article; at most, slapping on a “image from the internet” credit was considered honest and conscientious. “Visual China,” by contrast, waited by the stump for rabbits, seeking out various internet companies that used copyrighted images without authorization, suing them, and winning a lot of compensation, which naturally made it notorious.
Setting aside whether “Visual China”’s specific methods were legitimate or amounted to opportunistic baiting, its broad principle is beyond reproach — after all, images, like texts, are the fruit of creators’ labor, and taking them without asking is of course wrong.
Take this black hole photo: although it looks blurry and unremarkable, it condenses two full years of work by several top scientific institutions around the world, and it mobilized eight radio telescopes across the globe, the most powerful of which alone cost as much as 1.4 billion U.S. dollars. How much creativity, sweat, and resources are embodied behind this photo? Such an image is worth countless fortunes.
Yet because of the nature of the internet, no matter how precious an image or text may be, once it goes online, it becomes something anyone can click with a mouse and claim for their own use in under two seconds. If this kind of copying and pasting is utterly unconstrained, how could it reflect the respect due to creators?
Visual China really can sell pictures, but you can too
So, if we must pay the astronomers in order to use this photo, that would also be reasonable. But fortunately, they do not require us to pay; we can use it entirely free of charge.
So does that mean the creators privately authorized Visual China, letting them act as an agent for the photo’s copyright in China? Obviously not. In fact, the creators of the black hole photo really did authorize Visual China, but not through a private transaction; it was a completely public “transaction.” In fact, the creators long ago made a public offer of transaction to all possible users, including you, me, and Visual China: as long as we meet the conditions, we can have the right to use this image, and even to profit from it.
In other words, not only does Visual China have the right to “sell” this photo, you and I also have the right to use this photo to make money.
How does that work? Actually, we only need to go to the photo’s publisher, the website of the European Southern Observatory, and take a look.
On the photo page, the website thoughtfully provides images in various formats and sizes for you to download, and indicates the “Usage.”
The usage terms are that as long as you accept the CC-BY (Creative Commons — Attribution) license, you may use it non-exclusively and free of charge! You can even modify it, or open a tiny paid black room to attract viewers, charging 80 yuan for a single glance — in short, anything goes; do whatever you please!
The free and open CC license
Of course, the premise for doing whatever you please is that you accept this license. So what exactly is this CC license?
CC is short for Creative Commons. It is a non-profit organization founded in 2001, and also the name of the licenses promoted by this organization. In mainland China it is translated as “knowledge sharing,” and also as “creative commons” or “shared creativity”; “creative commons” seems a bit more accurate. CC is not one license, but a plural set of licenses, including four conditions that combine into six licenses in total.
The four conditions are BY (Attribution), NC (Non-Commercial), ND (No Derivatives), and SA (Share Alike). Among them, BY is mandatory (otherwise it is called CC0, meaning renouncing all copyright), while SA and ND are mutually contradictory (SA sets the conditions for derivatives), so the combinations amount to six possibilities: BY; BY-SA; BY-ND; BY-NC; BY-NC-SA; and BY-NC-ND.
Notice that the black hole photo was released under the very loosest of these, namely the one with only the attribution (BY) requirement. That is to say, there are no restrictions on commercial use, no restrictions on derivatives, and no additional clauses.
Specifically, on the black hole photo page, the words “Credit: EHT Collaboration” are given, and the licensing requirement is that you must clearly and visibly mark the contributors to the relevant image as credit. In addition, if you make modifications, you cannot attribute those modifications to the original contributors. In other words, as long as you indicate that this image comes from “EHT Collaboration,” and if you have modified it, state that it has been modified, then you can “do whatever you please.”
In addition to BY, SA (Share Alike) is also often used. This requires that if you modify the original work, or create a new work based on the original work, you must still release it under the same license; that is, if you obtain adaptation rights through the CC-BY-SA license, then your adapted work must also be released under the CC-BY-SA license. But this black hole photo does not even use the SA clause. In other words, I can put a watermark on it and then charge licensing fees for that watermarked image, or forbid others from distributing the new image with the watermark. Visual China can of course do this, and so can you.
What’s so good about the CC license?
As you can see, the CC-BY license comes very close to renouncing copyright, allowing anyone to freely use one’s work. So why would creators choose such an “altruistic” license?
The spirit of Creative Commons is somewhat like that of open-source software; in fact, it was inspired by open-source licenses such as GNU’s Free Documentation License (GFDL). Wikipedia, for example, used GFDL, and later gradually became compatible with CC licenses.
The purpose of CC licenses is also similar to that of open-source software: to encourage the spread of knowledge and to incentivize collaborative creation. Take a great work like Wikipedia, for instance. It absolutely cannot be completed by any single person or a small clique; in fact, it is never “finished” at all, but is always open to additions and revisions by internet users around the world.
Apart from programmers in the open-source community, academia is the most receptive to this idea. Since modern times, the explosive growth of scientific research has owed not only to theoretical revolutions within science itself, but also to the rise of the “academic circle” built upon countless cheap and open books and journals that originated in the print age. It is precisely thanks to the emergence of academic exchange platforms that transcend schools of thought and regions that academic research ceased to be, as it had been in ancient times, merely scattered sparks from a few geniuses or masters, and instead became a shared undertaking in which countless people advance in relay. Even the most ordinary university student may obtain the latest research results in a relevant field, and may even join the newest research work, standing on the shoulders of peers to add a brick or a tile to the edifice of human knowledge.
Academic research is precisely this kind of “knowledge sharing” platform that can never be “completed,” and that is open at any time to anyone’s learning and revision. This is also why we can take photographs of black holes: it is itself the product of countless researchers around the world advancing in relay and collaborating with one another. If each scholar were like an artisan of antiquity, jealously guarding an “ancestral secret recipe” and keeping their experimental data under wraps, how could such astonishing achievements ever have been made?
In the internet age, many creators in literature and the arts have also begun to accept the CC license and its open, shared philosophy. On the one hand, in an environment of information overload, it is becoming harder and harder for literary and artistic creators to make their works widely known. Good wine can still fear the depth of the alley, and some creators do not want their labor to be buried in obscurity; they would rather give up a certain degree of copyright in exchange for their work being more widely circulated. On the other hand, new media is also changing traditional art forms: the process of creating artistic works is no longer limited to shutting oneself up in one’s own studio and working in isolation; it may also involve many people jointly interpreting a work in an open, interactive environment.
In short, the CC license advances the tradition of “knowledge sharing” and “collaborative creation,” while also opening up new possibilities for creation in the internet age.
After more than a decade of promotion, CC licenses have already had considerable influence worldwide. In Google or Bing search engines, when searching for images, one can specifically add the CC filter, making it easier to find openly licensed images. But regrettably, in China, CC licenses are still unfamiliar; only recently has Baidu Search added a “copyright” tag, and most netizens’ understanding of copyright still stops at “payment.” If the first black hole photo can, beyond popularizing astronomy, also prompt Chinese people to think more about copyright issues, then that would be wonderful.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply