Creative Commons Is Resurrecting Palmyra

from the saving-history dept

Creative Commons launched its 2017 Global Summit today with a rather moving surprise: a seven-foot-tall 3D printed replica of the Tetrapylon from Palmyra, Syria. For those who don't know the tragic situation, Palmyra is one of the most historic cities in the world — but it is being steadily destroyed by ISIS, robbing the world of countless irreplaceable artifacts and murdering those who have tried to protect them (the folks at Extra History have a pair of good summary videos discussing the history and the current situation in the city).

Among ISIS's human targets was Bassel Khartabil, who launched Syria's CC community several years ago and began a project to take 3D scans of the city, which CC has been gathering and releasing under a CC0 Public Domain license. He was captured and imprisoned, and for the past five years his whereabouts and status have been unknown. As the #FreeBassel campaign continues, Creative Commons is now working to bring his invaluable scans to life in the form of 3D-printed replicas, starting with today's unveiling of the Tetrapylon — which was destroyed in January along with part of a Roman theatre after ISIS captured the city for a second time.

This isn't the only such project — the Institute of Digital Archaeology and UNESCO unveiled a replica of part of the Temple of Bel in London last year — and these combined efforts are a critical bulwark between ISIS and its goal of eliminating this part of our shared cultural history. You can read more about CC's project — including status updates on the other artifacts, monuments and architecture that they are reproducing — on the #newpalmyra website (at the time of writing it still lists the Tetrapylon as "coming soon", though that will likely change shortly).

Much of this weekend's summit is likely to revolve around the ongoing tension between open culture and intellectual property regimes, but I can't think of a better way to kick things off than with something that even the staunchest copyright maximalist can surely agree with: that the treasures of this 2,000-year-old city belong to us all, their destruction is a travesty, and the ability to preserve them even in some small way is a triumph of technology and the cultural commons.

Filed Under: creative commons, culture, isis, open culture, palmyra, preserving history
Companies: creative commons

The Met Goes Public Domain With CC0, But It Shouldn't Have To

from the unfortunate-necessities dept

The ongoing digitization of the vast wealth of material sitting in museums and archives around the world is one of the greatest projects of the digital age — a full realization of the internet's ability to spread knowledge and culture to all. Or it would be, if it weren't for copyfraud: for every museum genuinely embracing open content and the public domain, there's another claiming copyright on public domain images and being backed up by terrible court rulings.

And so it's fantastic to see The Metropolitan Museum of Art joining the former camp with a new Open Access policy that is putting images of 375,000 works online with a CC0 public domain declaration. The Met actually partnered with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Pinterest and others to help make this happen, and has even announced its first Wikimedian-in-residence who will head up the project to get these images into Wikimedia Commons and onto Wikipedia.

This is all great, but here's the annoying thing: it should be totally unnecessary. These are digitizations of public domain works, and there's no reasonable basis for granting them any copyright protection that would need to be divested with a CC0 mark in the first place. They are not creative transformative works, and in fact they are the opposite: attempts to capture the original as faithfully and accurately as possible, with no detectable changes in the transfer from one medium to another. It might take a lot of work, but sweat of the brow does not establish copyright, and allowing such images to be re-copyrighted (in some cases hundreds or even thousands of years after their original creation) would be pointless and disastrous.

Instead of the CC0 mark, the Met should be able to use a lesser-known Creative Commons tool: the Public Domain Mark, which indicates that something you are sharing is already in the public domain (whereas CC0 declares that you have rights in it, but are relinquishing them and releasing it to the public domain). And while the Met probably could have done so (and likely discussed this with CC since they were partners in this project), it's understandable why they decided not to: the statutory public domain is so damn weak and vulnerable that it can't be trusted, and a CC0 license is actually a much stronger way of ensuring nobody tries to exert control over these works in the future.

As Creative Commons points out on their information page for the Public Domain Mark, they don't recommend it for works where there is any doubt, in any jurisdiction, that they are in the public domain — a category that is virtually empty when all factors are considered. Though efforts to establish copyright on digitizations of PD works have mostly failed in the US, they have gained ground in Germany and the UK among other places. And attacks on the public domain are creative and frequent in the US too. Though it's somewhat hard to envision how another party could swoop in to attempt to take copyright control of the Met's digitizations, there would also be the possibility of the museum changing its stance in the future — and any such uncertainty creates a chilling effect where everyone who wants to make use of the images has to think twice. The CC0 mark is the strongest available statement that something is in the public domain.

Sadly, even CC0 is not completely waterproof, and it's a problem in the first place that the only way to release something into the public domain in most jurisdictions is via a third party's special licensing tools, not an official legal mechanism under copyright law. That's how you end up with a museum needing to partner with international copyright experts just to be able to make it absolutely clear that they don't own any rights to an unknown copyist's 100-year-old painting of a 4000-year-old Egyptian relief, which frankly should have been obvious. Kudos to the Met for doing everything it possibly could in a world that sometimes seems determined to snuff out as much of the public domain as it can.

Filed Under: cc0, creative commons, public domain
Companies: creative commons, metropolitan museum of art

Austrian Courts Uphold Creative Commons License Terms -- For Now

from the but-it's-not-over-yet dept

Last week, Mike wrote about an important case involving one of the Creative Commons licenses. The fact that some 15 years after the CC movement started and the courts are still trying to bring legal clarity to the use of CC licenses is further proof that the law tends to lag far behind technology. Given their rarity, it's interesting to see another recent case involving a CC license, this time in Austria, pointed out by Alan Toner on his blog.

As the timeline (in German) of the events indicates, the story began in January 2014, when thousands of left-wing protesters demonstrated against a ball organized by the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), held annually in Vienna. Following attacks on property and the police during the protest, one person was arrested, and in June 2014 his trial began.

The left-wing film collective Filmpiraten published a couple of short videos relating to the person involved. Shortly afterwards, the FPÖ used excerpts from the two Filmpiraten videos as part of a report published on its YouTube channel. The FPÖ video was released under the standard YouTube license, which claims full copyright in the material. However, both the Filmpiraten videos used a Creative Commons license -- specifically, the BY-NC-SA license. Under its terms, others may use the material free of charge, but are required to release the resulting work under the same CC license.

The FPÖ video did not respect that condition, so Filmpiraten's lawyers sent a letter asking for its material not to be used. The FPÖ responded by taking Filmpiraten to court, demanding €35,000 (about $40,000) in compensation for what it said were false accusations about its use of copyrighted material. The court case finally began in February 2015, and in July 2016 the judge ruled in favor of Filmpiraten, effectively upholding the Creative Commons license.

One worrying aspect of the case is that Filmpiraten struggled to find the resources to conduct such an expensive and time-consuming legal battle. As a spokesperson for the organization told the Austrian site futurezone, that may be why the FPÖ has adopted this approach -- and why it is now appealing to a higher court in an attempt to get the judge's ruling overturned.

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Filed Under: austria, copyfraud, copyright, creative commons, filmpiraten, fpo, freedom party
Companies: filmpiraten, fpo

Creative Commons Wants To Step Into Lawsuit Over Definition Of 'Noncommercial' In A CC License

from the this-could-be-interesting dept

Two decades ago, there were a series of lawsuits against copy shops over whether or not it was fair use for them to be photocopying educational materials for college coursepacks. Unfortunately (and, some of us still think, incorrectly) the courts ruled that this was not fair use. The end result was that the price of coursepacks shot up to astronomical levels (this happened while I was in college, and I saw coursepacks increase in price from $20 - $30 to well over $100, and they've gone up more since then).

Earlier this year, it appears that a new version of this kind of lawsuit was filed by Great Minds, an educational non-profit, against FedEx, the shipping giant who also took over what used to be known as Kinkos copy shops, now rebranded as FedEx or FedEx Office. At issue: these copy shops owned by FedEx were photocopying some of Great Minds' works for educational entities. Great Minds says that FedEx is infringing on the copyright. If that was all there was to it, based on the cases back in the 90s, Great Minds would have a slam dunk of a case (unfortunately).

Here's the twist: the works in question, Great Minds released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, or the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. So at the heart of this issue is what is meant by "noncommercial" in this license. Great Minds argues that because FedEx is profiting off the copying, it's commercial, and thus the license is violated and the copies are infringing:

This explicit limitation of the License to noncommercial use requires that commercial print shops, like FedEx, negotiate a license and pay a royalty to Great Minds if they wish to reproduce the Materials for commercial purposes – i.e., their own profit – at the request of their customers. Thus, this limitation benefits Great Minds and the public, too, by providing Great Minds with additional financial resources to develop new curricula, which in turn can be made available nationwide for free, noncommercial use, and otherwise to further its educational mission.

Now, this is both an interesting question and a not particularly surprising one. For many, many, many years, I've pointed out some concerns I've had with the "noncommercial" license that Creative Commons offers, because "commercial use" is kind of a vague idea at times, and seems to open up the opportunity for nutty cases (like this one!). In fact, we've also noted that the offering of a "noncommercial" license has resulted in some problematic branding confusion for Creative Commons, sometimes leading people to think that it's only for people who don't want to make money. And people have made the suggestion that CC may want to drop or otherwise spin off those NC licenses to avoid the confusion.

To its credit, Creative Commons has actually tried to address this issue proactively over the last few years, and has been careful to take a lot of the feedback into account. And part of that has resulted in increasingly defined guidelines that clarify what is and what is not commercial use in the context of Creative Commons.

And that makes the latest news quite interesting as well. Creative Commons is asking to file an amicus brief in the case, arguing that Great Minds has seriously misunderstood what NC means in a CC license. CC doesn't beat around the bush either:

We seek to file an amicus brief explaining why Great Minds’ interpretation of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license is wrong....

[....]

The point of Creative Commons licenses is to be useful tools that facilitate creative, socially constructive activity. Particularly (though not exclusively) where the licensee is an entity rather than an individual, the entity must be able to act as entities do, through employees and contractors alike. The artificial distinction drawn by Great Minds—between whether a school district employee pushes “copy” and pays FedEx Office for use of its copier, or a FedEx Office employee pushes “copy” on the same machine—would, if applied more broadly, preclude the use of most or all standard channels of dissemination and render the licenses all but useless. It would force users to choose between owning the entire chain of production or distribution, and leaving a trail of actionable copyright infringements in their wake. That is emphatically not how Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses were designed to work.

Creative Commons further points out that agreeing with Great Minds could create a real issue as tons of NonCommercial CC licenses may not do what people expected them to do:

Finally, we note that Great Minds has argued that “granting FedEx’s motion would create bad public policy.” See Pl.’s Opp. to Mot. to Dismiss at 15. That is backwards. Creative Commons takes no view on whether, as a general matter, it is good or bad policy for creators to license works to the world-at-large under precisely the terms Great Minds seeks to enforce in this litigation—by using their own licenses, not ones from Creative Commons. But to twist the meaning of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 to engineer that result would be profoundly damaging. It would disrupt the settled expectations of innumerable users and creators of works governed by CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licenses around the globe. And it would substantially diminish the utility of a license that enables the sharing of knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world.

Hopefully, CC is allowed to weigh in... and the court realizes how this lawsuit is a misinterpretation of the NonCommercial license.

Filed Under: copy shops, copyright, creative commons, fair use, non-commercial
Companies: fedex, great minds

The Getty Museum's Lessons Learned From Opening Up Content

from the stuff-to-think-about dept

Three years ago, we wrote about the Getty Museum's wise decision to fully support open content (it's important to note that this is the Getty Museum, and not the unrelated stock photo company, Getty Images, a known copyright troll). We were excited to see the museum embracing open access, and taking a principled moral stand on the issue:

Why open content? Why now? The Getty was founded on the conviction that understanding art makes the world a better place, and sharing our digital resources is the natural extension of that belief. This move is also an educational imperative. Artists, students, teachers, writers, and countless others rely on artwork images to learn, tell stories, exchange ideas, and feed their own creativity. In its discussion of open content, the most recent Horizon Report, Museum Edition stated that "it is now the mark -- and social responsibility -- of world-class institutions to develop and share free cultural and educational resources."

This is why we were similarly excited about the NY Public Library embracing the public domain, while disappointed in institutions like the UK's National Portrait Gallery try to lock up content behind questionable copyright claims. Making art and culture more widely available is an important moral imperative.

So it's interesting to see an update from The Getty about how its efforts to embrace openness are going. So far, so good, but they've discovered that actually implementing openness runs into some challenges that are interesting to discuss. But, first the good news:

since 2013 the Getty has released over 100,000 more images through the Open Content Program, and we are increasingly using open licenses for Getty-developed content including selected digital publications, Research Institute archival finding aids, Getty Museum online collection data, Getty Conservation Institute teaching and learning resources, and even the very blog you are reading right now. Throughout, our priority in developing openly licensed resources has been to make the Getty’s work as widely available and usable as possible, while retaining the right to attribution.

The article includes two specific case studies which highlight how tricky this can be and the case of freeing up access to Pietro Mellini's Inventory in Verse, from 1681 is an interesting example. At first glance, it seems like it should be easy. It's from 1681. The work is in the public domain. They also note that the original is in their collection so they don't need anyone else's permission in terms of digitizing it (and they agree that the digitization is in the public domain as well). The essays and translations that go with it were all done by Getty or Getty contractors so it holds whatever copyright there might be. And yet... there were still issues, in that some of the related images were from third party sources, and that created some concerns:

The only sticking points were the handful of images from third-party sources, for which permission had been sought and granted before the decision was made to make Mellini open access. In other words, the original permissions requests were simply for a digital publication, without any mention of CC-BY licensing, and thus contractual considerations prevented us from openly licensing the material.

So even in trying to provide wider access to a public domain work, there were issues around related information that had been licensed under different terms.

As the Getty notes, this is why it's kind of important for more museums (and others) to embrace a kind of "open first" principle -- so that they're taking care of these issues from the start, rather than having to back into them later.

it’s much easier to build an openly licensed project from the ground up than it is to make a project open after the fact. When open access is a project goal from the outset, it helps guide decision-making, especially with respect to contracts with collaborators and consultants, and the sourcing of images and code.

There's some other good stuff in there as well, including the fun of trying to open source software that involves modules from different sources with different kinds of open source licenses, but it's good to see this kind of knowledge sharing even on how to be better about knowledge (and culture) sharing...

Filed Under: copyright, creative commons, licensing, museums, open, public domain, sharing
Companies: getty museum

Chile's New Copyright Legislation Would Make Creative Commons Licensing Impossible For Audiovisual Works

from the no-freedom-to-make-it-free dept

Techdirt has written many times about the way in which copyright only ever seems to get stronger, and how different jurisdictions point to other examples of excessive copyright to justify making their own just as bad. In Chile, there's an interesting example of that kind of copyright ratchet being applied in the same country but to different domains. It concerns audiovisual works, and aims to give directors, screenwriters and others new rights to "match" those that others enjoy. Techdirt has already written about this bad idea in the context of the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances. But it turns out that Chile's proposed copyright legislation adds an extra twist that makes it even worse, because these rights will be unwaivable -- an approach we've seen before in Portugal. Here's what that will mean in practice, as explained on infojustice.org by Luis Villarroel, from the Chilean organization Innovarte:

the music composer of a work embedded in any audiovisual work, the writer of the drama, the Director, the camera man, etc, will not be able to waive their rights or license for free through a creative commons license or any other open licenses, or give works to the public domain.

To make it worse, because of the national treatment obligations this bill will also apply to foreign audiovisual works.

According to Villarroel, the legislation is being promoted by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers -- and by Chilean collecting societies. By an amazing coincidence, the new licensing fees will all be administered by the latter. Villarroel first wrote about this move last year, when the legislation was approved in Chile's House of Representatives. Despite the delay, it is apparently back on the agenda, and will be considered by the Senate, the country's upper house, soon.

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Filed Under: chile, copyright, creative commons

IFPI Files DMCA Takedown... On A Creative Commons Song... Posted 12 Years Ago.

from the really,-ifpi? dept

Let's take a trip in the wayback machine a bit.

It's late October 2004, and Wired Magazine has just released its November issue, which has a cover story about how sampling is the future, in which the magazine was able to get a bunch of well-known artists to contribute Creative Commons licensed songs, which shipped with a physical CD (remember, this is back in the day) and were also posted online and free for people to share and to reuse and remix. The article about it is worth reading. It talks about the nature of creative artwork:

Building on what other musicians have done – with or without their blessing or collaboration – is what it takes to make new music, music that will delight and sustain people. That, after all, is why it's called making music (playing music is something else altogether). Elvis Presley, that pioneer of appropriation, put it best: "Fair exchange bears no robbery, and the whole world will know that it's true. If you wanna be hugged, well, you gotta hug me too."

It also talks a lot about Creative Commons and the efforts it took to get all these well-known artists to contribute their songs. Hell, the very same issue even (shockingly) included an article by former RIAA boss Hilary Rosen, talking about how much she now loved Creative Commons, after Larry Lessig convinced her to change her views.

Lots of people wrote about all of this in one way or another. We, somewhat sarcastically (hey, what do you expect?) covered Rosen's conversion to being a CC supporter. Most of the coverage, however, focused (rightly) on the music. This included a young copyfighter named Derek Slater, who back in the olden days when blogs were blogs, wrote one on Harvard's website called A Copyfighter's Musings. He was so excited about the Wired issue and Creative Commons music CD that he wrote about it and posted the mp3s.

This was, of course, all perfectly legal. These tracks were released under one of two Creative Commons licenses, but both allowed the basic tracks to be shared online. As the Wired article noted:

The licenses come from Creative Commons, the innovative nonprofit founded by Wired columnist and Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. The songs on this CD use one of two Creative Commons licenses.The Noncommercial Sampling Plus license permits noncommercial file-sharing and noncommercial sampling. That means, first, that you can swap the songs on a peer-to-peer network (just don't sell them). And second, that you can sample from them, mash them up, use them to make something fresh – and then share that work, too (though again, you can't sell it). The Beastie Boys, Chuck D, and My Morning Jacket opted for the Noncommercial Sampling Plus license.

The other 13 artists on the CD went a step further and released their songs under the more expansive Sampling Plus license. Like the noncommercial version, it allows file-sharing. But it also allows commercial use of samples – meaning you can insert a slice of these songs into your own composition and then try to sell the new track. The only restrictions: Use in advertisements is not permitted, and the new work must be "highly transformative" of the original (translation: A flagrant rip-off like "Ice Ice Baby" doesn't cut it). More details on the licenses and their permissions are available at creativecommons.org/wired.

Okay... enough reminiscing in the wayback machine. Fast forward to today, where record labels and their trade associations -- rather than helping the industry adapt -- are spending all their time whac'ing moles by sending pointless takedowns via automated systems that never bother to check the details. The IFPI -- basically the international version of the RIAA -- is particularly crappy at this, regularly caught sending totally bogus takedowns.

As you've probably figured out, that historical world and today's world have clashed. IFPI, in its infinite (and most likely automated) cluelessness, has sent Harvard a DMCA takedown notice over one of the songs in the Wired Creative Commons collection -- the song "One Big Holiday" by the band My Morning Jacket. You can get it here because it's freely available thanks to Creative Commons.

You would think (wouldn't you?) that before sending out takedown notices, folks like IFPI are supposed to check on the licensing situation around those songs and whether or not IFPI even has the right to send such a takedown. In this case, even if they control the copyright, they most certainly do not have the authority to send a takedown, because doing so violates the terms of the license which the copyright holder agreed to when the song was released.

Thankfully, Harvard passed the notice along to Slater, who had lawyer Lila Bailey (occasional Techdirt guest poster) respond on Derek's behalf, basically saying, "IFPI, WTF?"

By sending this notice, you have knowingly materially misrepresented that this content is infringing in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), resulting in personal harm and financial expense to my client. As a courtesy to you and without prejudice to any further action we may take, I am writing to inquire whether you wish to withdraw your takedown notice....

[....]

Even the most basic investigation would have indicated that Mr. Slater's use is lawful and consistent with the Creative Commons license granted by the copyright owner. Under the United States Copyright Act, rightsholders are required to consider whether a use is lawful before issuing a takedown notice, and that requirement was plainly not followed here. This notice reflects an unfortunate pattern by IFPI, sending bogus takedown notices without any investigation into the rights status of the claimed works.

Of course, as we've discussed in the past, 512(f) of the DMCA has been rendered mostly toothless by the courts, but a good case could potentially change that. And issuing a DMCA over Creative Commons released music seems like a good test case, yes? I'm guessing that IFPI will take back its bogus takedown notice, but one wonders if it will actually change how it sends these things...

Filed Under: 512(f), 512f, copyright, creative commons, derek slater, dmca, lila bailey, my morning jacket, sharing
Companies: ifpi

Military Prison Blocks Won't Let Chelsea Manning Read EFF Blog... To Protect EFF's Copyright

from the yeah,-that's-like-totally-believable dept

Officials at Ft. Leavenworth prison, where Chelsea Manning is confined has apparently become super interested in protecting EFF's copyright. Or so they claim. Manning has been blocked from reading printouts of EFF blog posts, and the US Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) insists it's just about the copyright and not because they might disapprove of the EFF's message.

Manning was only allowed to have the Bureau of Prisons documents—an agency handbook and slide show on Facebook takedowns—but everything else was withheld. Instead, Manning received a notification that said the mail was rejected because it contained “printed Internet materials, including email, of a volume exceeding five pages per day or the distribution of which may violate U.S. copyright laws.”

It is possible that the Army withheld the documents because they were longer than fives pages. However, we believe this to be unlikely since the documents it did deliver were far longer than any of the other materials and exceeded five pages. That means that it was potentially copyright concerns that resulted in Manning’s mail being censored.

EFF quickly sent USDB a letter explaining that all EFF content is available for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution license that allows for the material to be freely shared and remixed. The Creative Commons license is indicated, and the full policy linked, at the bottom of every page of our website. As the copyright holder, we asked the prison to provide Manning with the documents immediately and not to block any further EFF material from the facility. We further pointed out that our comments to the FCC were also public records, not simply information printed out from the Internet. We asked for a response by Thursday, February 18, 2016.

Needless to say, the USDB did not respond. And it seems like a patently ridiculous argument to use copyright as an excuse to block prisoners from reading content sent to them, when it's quite clear that the copyright claim is being used solely as an excuse not to give prisoners content that the prison likely disapproves of.

And, again, this is the EFF we're talking about. Beyond the fact that the content is clearly licensed under Creative Commons to allow widespread sharing, perhaps no group has fought harder for things like fair use and the more widespread sharing of important information. To claim to be protecting EFF's copyright is basically spitting in the face of the EFF. An organization that wants to spread its information widely, and wants to make sure copyright law is amenable to that is now finding that it cannot distribute its own information... because of the very copyright law it fights against. And yet we're told again and again that copyright is for protecting the creators of content, yet here's it's being actively used against their wishes to block them from disseminating their own content. That's crazy.

Yet again (and this is all too common) we see copyright claims being used as a form of censorship (even as copyright system supporters still insist that's impossible). Yes, Manning is in prison and with that comes a loss of many freedoms. But using copyright as an excuse to deny EFF reading materials seems particularly ridiculous.

Filed Under: chelsea manning, copyright, creative commons, free speech, ft. leavenworth, prison, us disciplinary barracks, usdb
Companies: eff

Elon Musk Says SpaceX Photos Are Now Fully Public Domain

from the thanks-elon dept

In early February, we put out an open letter to Elon Musk, asking him to put SpaceX's photos into the public domain, noting that it was a shame that those photos would be locked up until long after we were all dead. NASA's photos are all in the public domain. While I'm extremely excited about the things that private spaceflight can accomplish -- it would be unfortunate if part of the deal was that we lost a great source of public domain imagery. Last week, the company started releasing its photos under a Creative Commons license, which was definitely a big step forward. However, we noted that we were still disappointed that it wasn't a pure public domain dedication, and in fact had a "non-commercial" restriction. So we once again asked if Musk might consider going that one step further to the public domain.

Over the weekend, he did just that: Extra kudos to Elon Musk for recognizing the issue and making the decision so quickly. Of course, the above is not entirely accurate. For reasons that are beyond me, Flickr does not offer a CC0 Public Domain dedication as an option on photos, so it looks like SpaceX has switched the photos to CC BY 2.0, basically removing the non-commercial restriction, but still requiring attribution. Still, given Musk's public statement, it seems likely that the company has no intention to enforce even that restriction.

One separate note: I was a bit surprised by the number of comments on our last story that seemed to indicate that it was absolutely crazy of me to dare to suggest that a private company put photographic works into the public domain. This is unfortunate. It is depressing how much the myth that everything needs to be "owned" has become pervasive in society, often due to the false claims made by legacy industries. Freeing up works so that the public can benefit from them has tremendous global benefits, even for the private interests who put those works into the public domain. Elon Musk recognized this with Tesla's patents, and he appears to be doing the same with SpaceX's photos as well.

And, yes, freeing these photos likely will come back to benefit SpaceX as well. It will enable others to take those works and build off of them, perhaps doing research or publications that will increase the demand for SpaceX's services in launching things (and, eventually, people) into space. And those benefits are likely to be much more valuable than whatever SpaceX might have gotten in a "license" deal for a few photos to some commercial source.

It's astounding to me the short-term, narrow-visioned view of the world some people have, in which they think licensing is the answer to everything, not recognizing just how much innovation and freedom it naturally suppresses.

Oh, and since I can now do this without any worry, here are a couple of great SpaceX photos, that Musk says are in the public domain. Enjoy!

Filed Under: creative commons, elon musk, photos, public domain, space
Companies: spacex