Here’s a nice demonstration of the power of releasing your photos under a Creative Commons license… a photograph of Bill Clinton that I once took is now featured in this month’s Science magazine!

The fellow who wrote the paper was nice enough to let me know about my picture appearing in Science, writing me to say “Hello – I am writing because you kindly granted permission for your photography to be used in a paper submitted to the journal Science.” Yesss! He understood that permission had already been granted 🙂 Too frequently people e-mail me asking permission to use my photographs and such, when the whole point of the CC license was so they could use it without wasting my time, so long as they follow my license terms. Of course in this case he probably didn’t need to use Creative Commons-licensed photos, I’d say he has a pretty good case for fair use here, publishing part of a picture in an academic journal. But hey, whatever.

Check out this nice summary of the article and see how we can teach a computer to recognize Bill Clinton’s face!

P.S. Thanks to Elsa for mentioning the article to me too… it’s always good to know that even if the author had neglected to inform me, my friends would have kept me up to date 🙂