Well done Wired you rock!

Wired magazine has announced that they are hopping on the Creative commons bandwagon and that they will be publishing some images for any one to use. If you think this is a bad move for photography and publishing in general then read on.

My take on this is that its one of the best publicity stunts I have seen in a very long time and that Wired magazine has managed with this to mock the wave of creative commons free riders big time.

If you look at the first 50 images that they have published you will see what I mean. How is going to use these images and what is their usability. Its next to none. Mark Zuckerberg image is bad and unless you want to write something bad about him its useless. Steve jobs has gone to an other world and will hardly be much written about in the future and the other images are so special that they are of no use but to very few.

On top of this the usage protocol is such that you will have to go through the magazine page by page to find the original story, which you must link to and other linkage rules are such that when you have read all those rules and creative commons liecensing rules to, you probably give up and look elsewhere or ask to buy the images from them. In the meantime you have read through the magazine and probably visited a couple of ads to.

"Photos must be properly attributed to the photographer and Wired.com, and, if used online, we ask for a link back to the original story where the photo first appeared.

We welcome editorial use by bloggers or any other publisher, but we are not authorizing commercial use, like using one of our photos in an advertisement."

I have seen no one mock the use of Creative commons in such a big and beautiful way as this. It tops most of the ad campaigns there have been for a long time and they are getting hell of a publicity from all the free riders that think they have reach heaven.

Sorry for those that really believed that this was their goldmine. You have been fooled and warned . If you do not want pay for quality you get useless rubbish. 

Well done Wired you rock!