Lawrence Lessig

Unsplash started because of a simple problem: we had extra photos left over from a photoshoot and didn’t want them to go to waste.

We thought if there was a chance someone else could use these photos for their own project, then why not share them? We never expected that 2.5 years later we’d be serving up hundreds of millions of photos a month and prepping for our first book.

When we posted those first few photos, we had to make a decision about which license to put them under. They were technically ‘our’ photos, and we had to let people know that they could use them for whatever they wanted without fear of a copyright lawyer knocking at their door.

So we turned to Creative Commons—an incredible organization dedicated to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.

The Creative Commons licenses fit perfectly with the ethos of Unsplash: Give people free access to raw materials and they’ll build something amazing.

Of course, nothing in the legal world is easy, and so we had to choose a specific license to put all Unsplash photos under. We went with CC0—meaning there are no stipulations on the use of Unsplash photos. Once they’re up on the site, they’re essentially in the public domain and you’re free to use them as you’d like, whether it’s to highlight your blog post, for a school project, or even for the cover of your band’s latest album.

Because this idea of ‘do whatever you want’ is so integral to Unsplash, I wanted to share an e-mail exchange between Creative Commons co-founder (and, until recently, US democratic presidential candidate) Lawrence Lessig and Unsplash co-founder Luke Chesser from when we first started.

From Lawrence:

I love your site (and have curated one of your collections), and as a co-founder of Creative Commons, I’m honored you would use our tools. But one question: Why wouldn’t you pick the CC-BY license? Or if you don’t want to impose any legal obligation, why not add the notion that giving credit is the decent thing to do. You’ve got such great photographers. Seems sad to lose a link to them?

From Luke:

Hey Lawrence,

Thanks again for curating — it was a huge honour for us to have you contribute (I personally loved reading Remix and The Future of Ideas).

We chose the CC0 license for a few reasons:

While attribution is great, we’ve seen a lot of uses where attribution isn’t possible or hurts the underlying product. Coming from the developer/open-source community, we’re also used to building and sharing work without requiring that contributions be attributed directly.

Unsplash started when we released our own photos. We chose the CC0 license because we wanted the community to get the maximum use out of the photos (and we really didn’t care if we were attributed — it was just cool to see the photos being used). When we added a section for guest contributions, there was a huge response from the community. While we obviously don’t expect everyone to share the same enthusiasm for open-source, it seems like the exposure tradeoff is worth it for a lot of amateur and professional photographers.

Having said that, we do actively encourage the community to attribute the photographers when it’s possible. We could do a better job of that on the license page though, and I’ve added that as something for us to update in a future release.

So much has changed since those days, but we’re still confident that we made the right choice in licensing Unsplash photos in such an open manner.

Of course we want every photographer to be properly credited for their work (because, why shouldn’t they?), but we understand that there are certain use-cases where this just isn’t a possibility. And for the greater sharing economy to continue to thrive, we need to remove as many limitations and barriers as possible.

We were lucky enough to get Lawrence to write a short piece for the Unsplash Book and there’s one quote that hit home with us upon reading:

“There is nothing more human or more beautiful than the gift of sharing creativity. That’s not to say one must always share. That’s not to say that commercial work is criminal. It is simply to recognize, and honor, the gift that creators give when they make their work freely available to others.”

The Unsplash Book is our way of honoring creatives. Of giving credit (and compensation) to artists who never expected any in the first place. Of showing our continued support for this open, sharing, creative community.

We’re so excited to be able to do this and want you to be a part of the process.

We’re launching our Kickstarter campaign to help fund the book on November 18th, and anything you can do to help spread the word about what we’re doing here would be so appreciated.

Once the cost of producing the book is covered, all proceeds from the campaign will be split amongst the contributors.

The more we are able to raise, the more we are able to give back to these incredible people who have given their work so freely.

If you’d like to help in any way please get in touch!

And for those of you who have already helped select photos, thank you so much for coming along on this ride. We’re going to keep the surveys up until the campaign launches so if you haven’t had a chance to go through them yet, please do.

Thank you!