Writing on behalf of the The Burning Man Organization (BMO), Andie Grace has issued a response to the EFF blog post which criticized the annual fest's photo policies as overly restrictive:
Believe me, I'd love to see a better solution than wading through piles of images to approve certain public uses (and turn down or enforce against others) every year, but after 10 years working with these licenses and observing their utility during the evolution of the digital age, the only thing I'm certain of is that the issue is not as simple as the EFF would like you to think.
Example: find me a participant who would vote "yes" on seeing a video or photo of the Man burning, or their own art car or sculpture, in a car commercial. You probably can't – but even the Creative Commons Noncommercial license wouldn't enable Burning Man itself to enforce against such use, nor the dozens of other similar violations it sees each year because the car company would claim (correctly) that Burning Man has no standing to enforce the Creative Commons license, only the photographer does — and what if the photographer was the one who sold the image to the ad agency in the first place? What if we couldn't locate the photographer to join forces with us? A Creative Commons license simply does not provide Burning Man the direct ability to enforce against such use – something we've unfortunately run up against many times as we work to keep such commercialist wolves at bay.
"Snatching Digital Rights" or Protecting Our Culture? Burning Man and the EFF (blog.burningman.com)
(Livingbrush Woman Art by Scott Fray, Image by Bryce Hunt)
