Little help from far away, thanks to Creative Commons and Daruma

A few weeks ago a Flickr user dropped me a piece of Flickr mail asking if she could use one of my photos.

Hi there,

I’m helping with a fund raising bake sale for victims of the recent earthquakes and tsunami in Japan. I was looking for a daruma image to use for the packaging of my cookies and came across yours. Can I use it? If so, how would you like the attribution to appear?

Thanks so much.

Of course I said yes. I was flattered to be asked and thrilled to have some small part in helping Japan. I have my photos set to an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license, so technically nobody has to ask me to use my photos for non-commercial purposes. Some CC purists are bugged by being asked. For me, the volume of requests I get is so low, it’s always fun to hear from people and find out what they’re planning on doing with my photos.

I heard from the requester again yesterday and today – she reported that the bake sale did really well, and probably netted over 100K overall for Japan. She also said the cards made with my Daruma photo were very popular. And she sent along this piece about the sale. If you scroll down a few photos, you’ll see the photo from above made into a lovely card tucked in to some of the cookies.

I’m so proud, and glad I could help in this tiny way though clearly the bakers and sellers did the work here. Thank you, Gustadora, and thank you Flickr and Creative Commons.

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