Bits is reporting that Getty will be trolling through images on Flickr and soliciting photographers for rights to resell their photos:
Yahoo and Getty Images said Tuesday that they have entered into a partnership under which Getty editors will comb Flickr in search of interesting images. They will then invite photographers to participate in the program and ensure that their images have the proper releases to be licensed legally. Those who are included in the program will get paid at the same rates that Getty pays photographers who are under contract with the company.
Great Photo on Flickr? Getty Images Might Pay You For It [Bits.Blogs.NYTimes.com]
What if all my pictures are already licensed with Creative Commons?
I’m no CC expert, Dr. Tran, but I would image you could go ahead and sell the image just fine. CC doesn’t preclude you licensing your work to commercial sources. It’s not the GPL.
The GPL doesn’t preclude commercial use or selling of the software either, last I checked. (Though I admit I haven’t perused the anti-DRM intended changes of GPLv3, compared to GPLv2.)
Likewise, anyone can make a buck off of CC licensed material as long as the Non-Commercial (NC) stipulation isn’t included.
As I’ve attempted to argue in other threads, it is in fact possible to earn money and allow the information you’ve generated to be Freely redistributed and remixed.
(You just have to get out of the mental trappings of an industrial economy, where large fixed costs are amortized over inexpensive mass-production. What you’re in fact selling in a knowledge economy is the ability to create new things (i.e. use of your brain for creativity), not the resale of copies of things that already exist — because literally everyone can do that latter part with the copy command of their computer.)