publicdomain

The J. Paul Getty Museum added around 88,000 images of artworks from its collection to its Open Content database.

The Getty Images' Italian website is being forced to remove any content that depicts Michelangelo's David after legal action was brought by the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Respected Colorado nature photographer John Fielder has died aged 73 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Melania Trump's latest NFT drop that celebrates the Apollo 11 lunar landing prominently uses a photo from NASA's archives, which is a violation of the space agency's image usage rules.

A noted landscape photographer has donated his entire life's work to the public domain, entrusting it to History Colorado.

The Albert Kahn departmental museum in France has released nearly 25,000 color photos of early 20th-century life into the public domain and over 34,000 others that are free to use as part of a project to assure visual history is not forgotten.

Former Chief White House photographer Pete Souza says he is being threatened with legal action over the use of his own photo that he took of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

A student website received a letter demanding thousands of dollars for a copyright infringement after using a Creative Commons image.

B.J. Novak is best known for acting in, writing, directing, and producing the hit TV show The Office. Over the past several years, however, his face has also appeared in all kinds of products around the world... completely without his knowledge or permission.

Unsplash has just released "the most complete high-quality open image dataset ever": an open-source collection of over 2 million images captured by over 200,000 photographers, now available to download in bulk for free.

NASA photographers don't get a lot of love. Since they work for a government agency, their images are released into the public domain and are often only credited as "Photo by NASA." The agency's internal Photographer of the Year contest aims to provide some well-deserved recognition.

Thank you to everyone who read the recent article about my short animations, and to all of the people who reached out to ask me for a tutorial. Since so many people were curious, I decided to put together a tutorial where I take you along for the ride while I create one of the animations from the original article.

Like many others, Swiss photographer and director Nicola Tröhler has had all of his jobs cancelled due to COVID-19. So, since he can't go out and take any photos, he decided to tap the public domain libraries in Switzerland and the US and work on his animation skills instead.

What began as one of the most explosive, publicized, and potentially ground-breaking copyright lawsuits in the world has ended in less-than-explosive terms. Carol Highsmith's $1 billion lawsuit against Getty Images has, for the most part, been thrown out of court.

Getty Images has filed their official response to Carol Highsmith's highly-publicized $1 Billion copyright claim against the company. And the gist of the response is, in essence, "no take backsies."

On Friday, SpaceX made history by performing its first successful ocean barge landing following a resupply mission to the ISS. Today, they released the photos.

The Federal Art Project was a Depression-era program that launched in 1935 to fund projects by visual artists in the US. That same year, American photographer Berenice Abbott received funding for a "Changing New York" photo project to document New York City.

She shot 305 photos for the project between 1935 and 1939, and her work was published in a photo book and distributed to public institutions in New York.

This week, the New York Public Library announced that it has released 187,000+ high-resolution digital images of public domain items in its collection.

If you come across any photograph published in the US before 1923, you're free to use it for whatever purpose you'd like, with or without permission, and with or without attribution. Why? Because its copyright has expired and it's public domain.

Strangely enough, sometimes free public domain photos get sold as stock photos, and those who don't know any better may pay large sums to use something they could have used for free.

Last week SpaceX posted its photos to Flickr and released them to the public domain. Unfortunately for the company, Flickr didn't have any public domain designation they could use, so even though SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the photos were public domain, the images were shared under a Creative Commons license that required attribution.

That has now changed. Flickr announced yesterday that it has created two new options for members in the copyright dropdown panel: public domain and CC0, which allows users to release content to the public domain.

A team at the University of Texas is set to create thousands of macro photographs showing the beauty and diversity of the smallest critters in the state of Texas. Every one of the photos will be released to the public domain, allowing anyone to do anything with the photos without charge (or even permission).

NASA is a government agency, so the photographs it creates are released to the public domain and can be used by anyone for any purpose. Now that private companies such as SpaceX are getting involved in space exploration and collaborating with NASA, the copyright of mission photos becomes a little more murky.

All that cleared up in a big way this past weekend: SpaceX is following NASA's lead and will now be releasing photos to the public domain.

Launched back in 2013, Unsplash is a site which posts ten handpicked photos every ten days and these photos are absolutely free. By “free” I don’t mean “free to download” — they’re free to use everywhere and in any way you want. Commercially and whatnot.

Which is a great thing, right? Finally, a place with photos hip enough to use on a lifestyle blog or design agency’s website. I’ve seen hundreds of sites using them, including ecommerce. I’ve also seen them used in magazines, on T-shirts, in books and as prints. People are now earning money from unattributed Unsplash photos — everyone, it seems, but the photographers who took them.

Want to learn the basics of US copyright law without having to spend eons going through imageless websites and backbreaking textbooks? Check out Bound by Law. It's a comic book that translates abstract and confusing copyright laws into easy to understand "visual metaphors."

By the time you're through with the 72-page comic, you'll know quite a bit about the basics of copyright law, including fair use, infringement, and public domain.

14 million historic images collected from over half a millennium's worth of books are currently making their way, million-by-million, onto the Flickr Commons courtesy of a man named Kalev Leetaru and an organization called The Internet Archive.

The controversy surrounding the monkey selfies above, which were taken by an endangered crested black macaque using photographer David Slater's equipment, is heating up once again as Wikipedia parent Wikimedia refuses to remove the photo from its commons library, claiming that Slater does not own the copyright.

When people are browsing around online for photographs to use, be them for an article, a project or something else, it’s vital to know whether or not they’re allowed to use the image. Even if they’re allowed to use the image, it’s important to know what all can be done with it.

Here to help those with any image in question is this handy little infographic, created by Curtis Newbold, The Visual Communications Guy.

In an effort to bring 145 years worth of its historic photography collection to the computer age, the American Museum of Natural History has digitized over 7,000 of its archived images and made them publicly available online.

Normally, we wouldn't give much attention to the thoughts of an editor/publisher for a small community newspaper. But the response to photographer Kristen Pierson's notice of copyright infringement and invoice for payment is such a classic compendium of bad thinking on intellectual property that it would be a disservice not to share it ... just so you know what you're up against.

When the words "Getty" and "Free" make their way into the same sentence -- as they have a few times before -- photographers tend to tense up before they read on. But when we say that the Getty Museum is sharing 4,600 images for free, there's no need to fret.

In this case, Getty doesn't refer to the stock photography company, but rather the J. Paul Getty Museum. And the museum's newly launched Open Content Program looks to be a positive addition for all.

As the saying goes: "better late than never." In a move that puts Bing on par with the likes of Google's and Yahoo's image search engines, Microsoft's search giant has just added licensing refinements to its image searching capabilities as well.

If you're interested in donating your images to the public at large, Wikimedia Commons just made it that much easier. For a while now, their online media archive has brought together a huge library of free-to-use content under one roof; and because images uploaded to Commons must be licensed as public domain, GFDL, CC attribution, or CC attribution/share alike, everything is free to use and/or share.

Now Commons is releasing a new app (formerly only available in beta) that will allow users to upload photos to the Commons archive right from their phone and, it's their hope, encourage more people to contribute "high quality educational photos."

One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of "big camera" sensors into "small camera" bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that's smaller in size, why wouldn't you want to? (That's the idea, at least).

The quality and portability of cameras these days would be quite astonishing to photographers from back in the earlier days of photography -- the days in which you needed both hands and a strong back to work as a photojournalist. In this post, we've compiled photos from those "good ol' days" to see how far photography has come.

Project Gutenberg is a digital library volunteer effort that takes old public domain and converts them into freely available eBooks for the benefit of the general public. Founded back in 1971, the library now has over 42,000 items in its collection.

Among the books in its collection are a number of old books on the subject of photography. One such book is the 1881 title, The Art and Practice of Silver Printing by Capt. Abney and H. P. Robinson (shown above).

Flickr celebrated the 5th year anniversary of the launch of The Commons today. The massive collection of public domain photos now includes more than 250,000 images from 56 different libraries, archives, and museums.

The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of daguerreotype photographs captured over the past two centuries. In addition to browsing the technically perfect ones that document history and people, it's also interesting to look at metal plates that are flawed.