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Google To Host 10M Images From Life Magazine's Archive
CWmike and other readers alerted us to Google's announcement that it was making available 10 million images from Life magazine's archives dating back to the 1750s. (Most of the news accounts covering this announcement refer to Life's "photos," and none mention that photography wasn't invented until early in the 19th century.) Only a small percentage of the images — including newly digitized images from photos and etchings — have even been published. The rest have been "sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints." At this point about 20% of Life's archive is online; the rest is promised within months.
I wonder was the copyright is for these. Are they all public domain?
Digital photography really sucked back then!
The copyrights for previously-unpublished works vary, Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia probably have the answers you are looking for.
In general, anything created more than 120 years ago in the United States is in the public domain. Works that weren't "work for hire" live various-numbers-of-years after the death of the photographer but there is a presumption of public domain after 120 years unless it can be shown the photographer was alive "recently enough" that the copyright hasn't lapsed. There's also a "presumption of death on or before insert-date-here" under certain other circumstances.
I don't have the rules for previously-unpublished works-for-hire handy, but I think that for stuff not published before now, anything before 1923 is in the public domain in the USA. There were special rules in place a few years ago to "encourage" publishing previously unpublished works but I think that is over with.
If Life had done this during that special window, a lot of stuff that would have had only the remaining copyright would have enjoyed extended protection.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
For hot pictures, I lean more towards this or this.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Its good to know we can compare what the market looked like when the crash finally happens.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
you can find images from LIFE if you append this to an image search on google 'source:life'
Life-like indeed. It's magnificent.
I grew up learning about the world from Life and National Geographic. We were poor - pre-transistor days, couldn't even afford a radio -- but we had the media at our fingertips. I remember my father's part in WWII from pictures he showed me of places he'd been, in old copies of Life. I watched as the first seven astronauts were chosen. I watched the last moments of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King and watched an immense culture change from the pages of Life. The ability of Life photographers to capture the eyes of people and stories and places has never been equalled to my mind.
The fact that Google has arranged with the owners of all this Life Magazine material to put the archive online for the rest of you makes me feel a good bit better about Google's place in the Internet.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Hey everybody! Ankles!
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
That's 10,000,000 images, not 10 megapixels. Images will be standard 160x120 internet resolution with watermarks & popups.
It should read "10 million images dating back to the 1750s from Life magazine's archives" since Life (not the earlier humor magazine of the same name) was first published in 1936.
Lifelike... you betcha. I've been dying to get my hands on some Margaret Bourke-White images without having to pay Getty Images a few grand per print. Her pictures give a lifelike experience of what it was like to be in so many historical places back in the 40's. It's good that I can finally view these images without having to deall with GI's rediculous pricing policies.
Getty Images has long been the world's largest intellectual property holder. While the general public can get a hold of some of their holdings as prints through poster companies, etc., it's a very small percentage of what they have, and they make no apparent effort to deal with end consumers directly.
While this seems like just a nifty place to view pictured for some, I see it as a victory for those that oppose intellectual property abuse.
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
Arrgghhh... Scratch what I said before. New master, same slavery. The medium-view images are nice to look at but I tried blowing one up to a decent size and it's pretty heavy on artifacts. The high rez version has a nice big TIME watermark on it. However, the option to fram any print at a somewhat reasonable price ($80-$110 depending on size) is definitely a plus, and I think I may still act on it. It's still about a tenth of the price I was getitng from GI to get a full res print.
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
Stories that are told that are retold become our culture. If the stories are owned and cannot be retold they might be lucrative, but they can't become culture. Copyright is the theft of culture from the future. Copyright must be abolished because as implemented it prevents the fair use of works long in the public domain.
This is a good place to thank Larry for keeping up the good fight. God Bless you Larry, I hope you win and I'm glad to continue to donate to your cause.
Help stamp out iliturcy.