Monday, February 5, 2007

Special(ly) Mention(ed)!

I was pleased to find that I made it to the list of Special Mentions for my QotW3. Some notes about what I've done before/while/after putting the medal on my blog.

Firstly I got the original-size image off Kevin's Flickr, then cut it up into individual medals using Microsoft Office Picture Manager (handy tool for basic editing - brightness/contrast, color shading, cropping, resizing/compressing, etc.etc.... Let's call it MSOPM). Having done that, I opened each medal in Photoshop and erased the white background to make it nicer/more authentic. Finally I went back to MSOPM and resized the images so it fits as a small image befitting of a pictoral medal. The original image of 5 medals was like 3063x1259px... after I had cut them up each medal was 544x1259px. Crazy to put something like that up.

Fresh from the lecture on Copyright and Piracy I thought I'd better check out the Creative Commons license that Kevin attached with the image. And the terms are really interesting. If you would care to scroll down later or click the permalink above, or perhaps if you already opened the link in another window/tab, I used the same CC license for my edited image as Kevin, known as the BY-NC-SA license. And the only reason why
I did that was because the SA part of the license stands for Share Alike, meaning that 'If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.' (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5, 2007).

I don't think I misinterpreted the terms. It's made really clear with the word identical.

So there I have my first stamp on my derivative work. Well it's not really my first, but all my previous copyrighted works that next to no one reads. I guess one of the things about copyright and CC is that it makes authors and creators proud of their work, proud to say 'I did this.' It's really cool, you guys should try it sometime. I notice Valerie's already superimposed her Multiply URL on a couple of her pictures.

You can get the medal images from me if you want. Just don't put it up for fun.

1 comment:

Kevin said...

Renhao: Neat that you tried to do it on your own. Last night, I updated the medals based on some user feedback and made them to size (with transparency) on the Awards page of the COM125 blog. Do take a look. :)