Opening Thor

Sleeping Dog. By D. Parker Phinney. Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike.

I chopped up this photo of Thor before entering it into this contest. The original was CC by-nc-sa, but the contest requires that entries be by-sa. This means that if someone wanted to use my photo as the cover of zer new book, ze could do that without asking me, as long as ze credited me and kept the license attached to it. If this were to happen, someone would be making money off of my photo, but I would get some free advertising without any effort. There’s a lot of debate in the Free Culture community as to whether or not artists should use -nc licenses. In this case, I decided to go with it because I want to enter this contest, because I probably wasn’t going to make any money off of this photo anyway (I certainly wasn’t planning to actively seek any payment for it), and because there’s the off chance that I’ll get some exposure.

If nothing else, cropping the original led to a pretty neat homepage background image.