"copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice."
How to stop Yahoo from cashing in on your Flickr images @ engadget
"If you post Flickr images with a commercial-use creative commons license, Yahoo has a little surprise: it will soon be free to sell them and keep all the money. It recently decided to peddle canvas prints of selected photos for up to $50, taking 100 percent of the revenue from creative commons users who permit free use of their images. That contrasts with a recent decision it made to give select users with non-commercial-use licenses 51 percent of sales for the same "Wall Art" collections. The new policy has made many of the site's devotees upset -- especially pro account users -- who say that while they're fine with third-party companies using their photos, they're not fine at all with Flickr itself selling them for profit."
A closer look at Flickr’s curated Wall Art collections | Flickr Blog
Microsoft Is Getting Rid Of Clip Art | TechCrunch
"Microsoft has just announced that it’s killing off the last trace of clip art in its Office products, instead pointing users in need of imagery toward Bing Image Search. Why? Because most people are just getting their images online anyway.
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The Bing Image Search built into Office is essentially the same one that’s built into its standard search engine, just with Creative Commons filters switched on by default to allow for commercial use."
While leveraging "free" resources makes business sense, it would be reasonable to at least provide alternative rewards for those who share their work: tracking of usage, statistics, promoting authors etc... Yahoo, Microsoft, Yahoo for sure could trace and provide such information. The portion of such revenue could be donated to fund improving internet access, education on the web, Wikipedia etc. This at least may help inform people about licensing options...
