Does anyone have experience with media releases that also incorporate
Creative Commons licensing?  The Human Subjects Review board here at UC
Berkeley says that archaeological photography and video recording both lay
outside of the purview of the IRB, but that getting a media release would
be "the nice thing to do." Following the template of the media release
provided by the HSR office, I cobbled one together with an added clause
for Creative Commons licensing of the materials; however I am not sure of
its legality or overall worth. I was hoping that someone with more
experience in such matters would be able to give me advice.

There is a link to it here:

http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/human-subjects-review-...

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Colleen
--
Archaeology PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley

i've dealt with this before, but with elite scientists, who usually
want all the attention they can get.

Questions to ask:

1) are you attributing authorship (in the sense of owning a copyright)
to the people you are giving this form to.  That is, do they have any
reasonable justification for claiming copyright in the
images/texts/videos you are distributing?

1a) if not, then the media release is essentially an informed consent
form, in which you are specifying what will happen to the materials.
You might want to spell it out in more detail, since putting things
online is a permanent action (i.e. there is no rescinding permission
once you've done that. Thank you Google).  The form you linked to
doesn't really communicate that these materials will circulate
globally constrained only by a very lineral copyright license.  I
personally think the ethical thing to so is to say so.

1b) If so, then the form is a copyright-transfer contract, and you
might want to specify that you are asking for a non-exclusive license
to copy, display, transform, etc. the work and to release it under a
creative commons license. in this case the materials should list the
person as an author/owner of the materials, and your use of them as
modified works.

1b is sometimes safer, because it gives subjects/collaborators an
ownership and authorship stake... makes them more collaborators than
human subjects and hence fully outside IRB oversight... though not
outside AAA ethics.

hope that helps
ck

ck