I have changed the license on the photographs on my Photo Dharma website. Previously (as with most of the texts on my Ancient Buddhist Texts website) it was under a Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
That license states (in human readable form):
You are free:
to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
This is somewhat restrictive, but I used it just to ensure that people would contact me first before using the photographs for commercial works or changing them.
That allowance is indeed part of the license, which also states that the above conditions apply
With the understanding that:
Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
However, as people may not know about the waiver option, after some consideration it has seemed better to me to free up the license, so that it is immediately apparent that they can be used in commercial works and can be built upon (that means someone may take the photograph and add text, crop it in a different way, etc.)
So now the photographs are being licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license.
A copy of the human readable part of the license is below (the legalese can accessed from the original page). The main features are that the photographs can be shared and adapted provided the photographs are attributed, and that no exclusive copyright is claimed for the resulting work.
I hope this will encourage people to use the works and make more Buddhist works out of them, which is what I had intended when I set up the website in the first place.
I am about to publish a major book on Ashoka entitled Ashoka the Lost Emperor. I should very much like to include a photograph of the statue of Xuanzang with the Wild Goose Pagoda as background, just as it appears on your website. I should be most grateful to have your permission to include this photo in my book. Perhaps you could let me know how I can secure this photo and permission to publish. Yours Charles Allen