You may have noticed that at the bottom of our blog we have a “Some rights reserved” link. This relates to our use of one of the Creative Commons licenses which allows us to give everybody permission to use our material in certain ways.We also use a few pictures from Flickr on our website and the pictures we do use have a Creative Commons license which allows us to use them in a commercial setting assuming we display the license and credit the owner of the material.Just the other day we noticed that the picture on our home page had changed its license to “All rights reserved” which would ordinarily mean we could not use it.

So, what happens if you publish material (pictures, blog posts, podcasts, etc.) with a Creative Commons license and then later change your mind?

As far as we understand it you are perfectly entitled to change the license or stop distributing the material but you are not allowed to withdraw the Creative Commons license. So the moral of the story is that if you release material under a Creative Commons license you are stuck with that license until copyright expires: it never ends.

So what happened to the original homepage picture? We chose to change it, though technically we don’t have to, since a) we wanted to respect the picture owners change of mind and, more pragmatically, b) it might be difficult to prove that it was at one point published under a Creative Commons license.

So, hopefully you’ll appreciate the wonderful picture (Table Mountain in the background) by Victor Geere of Capetown which we’ll use for now.