Slashdot Mirror
Public Domain Image Repositories?
musicmaster asks: "If you search the net for free drawings you will find a lot of them, but usually they are free for private use only. I tried to look for drawings that are really free - that is public domain, but I didn't find very much. Wikipedia has some images - scanned from books with expired copyrights - but not much Could you help me further?"
here is a clip from their copyright statement...
The NASA, JPL, USGS, and NGDC images are in the public domain, but please give them credit when using their images. The following are two statements by NASA:
No copyright is asserted for these images. If a recognizable person appears in an image, use for commercial purposes may infringe a right of privacy or publicity. These images may not be used to state or imply the endorsement by NASA or by any NASA employee of a commercial product, process or service, or used in any other manner that might mislead. Accordingly, it is requested that if these images are used in advertising and other commercial promotion, layout and copy be submitted to NASA prior to release.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Houston TX, 77058
All of the images presented on NSSDC's Photo Gallery are in the public domain. As such, they may be used for any purpose. NSSDC does ask, however, that you acknowledge NSSDC as the supplier of the data. In addition, where the source of the image (by project or as a specific person) is credited in the text, you should also acknowledge that, too.
These come from public domain sources, that Dover re-prints on dead-trees.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"scanned from books with expired copyrights"
Did you know, whoever scans it automagically has the copyrights to the scan itself. It's like when the New York Philharmonic plays Mozart. Sure, the music's out of copyright (not that the United States EVER honored copyrights from the seventeenth century -- it couldn't, cuz' it didn't exist), but each "instantiation" isn't. Photos of famous paintings are the same way.
So, CAREFUL. Just because Raphael has been more than seventy years dead (or however copyright might read today), doesn't mean that the photographer of the photo you're looking at of one of his painting's is! (That should be rephrased for clarity, but whatever, 3.0 parses it.)
Likewise, just because the Penguin Classic you're eyeing has a title from the ninteenth century doesn't mean that the particular typography of the book is out of copyright. Only when you hold in your hand a book whose author, and the copyright holder of anything cited "used with permission", has been seventy years dead, can you use extracts from that book, and even then only if you make it yourself.
In other words, go take a picture of a tree and make it purdy with photoshop. It'll save you trouble.