Morphbank is planning on extending our copyright field to include a Creative Commons license with every image. It is important to apply these licenses to the images on Morphbank for a number of reasons:
1. This license (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Creative Commons by-nc-sa) best reflects the copyright policy Morphbank users have already agreed to when uploading to Morphbank.
2. They are clear, well-accepted licenses that use legal language. Creative Commons is already a well-developed standard for Web distributed artwork including images, blogs, videos and music.
3. Morphbank is planning to be an active participant (image repository) in the Encyclopedia of Life project. Adding clear copyright information to the images is necessary to participate.
4. There are a variety of licenses for users to choose from. We plan on using as the Morphbank default: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Basically the by-nc-sa license allows the use of the image for noncommercial purposes as long as the copyright holder is given explicit credit for that image. Also any resulting works using that image must also be shared freely under a similar license.
5.These licenses are non-exclusive. Which means that your image on Morphbank may be under this non-commercial license but you are still able to give/sell your images to a commercial endeavor without having to change the license on your Morphbank image. You retain the rights to your images and can do whatever you want with them. If you would prefer a different Creative Commons license to be added to all of your images please email us and let us know. Creative Commons has a license builder that is helpful in choosing a license. Please let us know if you have any questions about this license or any other Creative Commons licenses. It will be February, 2008 before we apply these licenses to give you a change to review them. Also at anytime we will gladly change your applied license until the user interface is complete where you will be able to do this yourself.