I love Creative Commons and the open culture movement. It’s why I use an open culture for almost all of my work.
From 2007 to 2012, I took some photographs professionally, and posted them to Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Two of my most popular collections are photographs of a 2008 Canadian Federation of Students rally and march in Toronto, and a series of 2009 photos when I traveled to Qatar on assignment. My photos of public figures at the state funeral for Lincoln Alexander in 2012 are widely used on Wikipedia.
This week, Canadian Dimension is using one of my CFS rally photos at the top of a story calling for free tuition written by the Canadian Federation of Students national treasurer.
Student newspapers regularly use that photo collection in their stories, usually in the lead-up to various CFS marches during the academic year.
I’ll admit to getting less than noble enjoyment from this use of my photo – almost a decade ago, Canadian Dimension ran commentary claiming I was part of a Conservative movement against the Canadian Federation of Students.
Turnover being what it is student politics, and my own decision to leave national journalism to work on fixing local news, the author probably has no idea of who I am.
My blogging and journalism from 2005 to 2011 helped inform students across the country about the systemic failings of the Canadian Federation of Students. Along with Titus Gregory’s investigative blogging on studentunion.ca (which deserves more credit than my work), the CFS accountability movement was seeded across the country, leading to the large exit of student unions from the CFS in the late ’00s, and continues to ripple in the current CFS independent movements.