Print this pageAny quick-and-dirty Google search for astronaut imagery yields a visual feast, from photographs taken in space to clumsy astro-erotica. One image in a search I undertook this morning, however, caught my eye: a photograph of an astronaut floating above the Earth’s cloudscape, his reflective visor turned towards the camera, his foil-covered tether spiraling upwards to the craft. An unremarkable image from the space race, but for one detail—it was emblazoned with the watermark of Getty Images.
This made me wonder—after all, images gathered in the course of NASA missions belong to the American people; they’re born in the public domain, part of our cultural commons. On what basis does Getty claim the image?
Curious, I clicked through to the Getty web site.
Getty notes that the astronaut in the photograph is Edward White, and that the photo was made during the Gemini-Titan IV mission on the 3rd of June, 1965. As the screen shot above shows, Getty claims credit for the image and the right to manage the license. The entry also describes the photographer as “Fox Photos/stringer.”
Well, that “stringer” would have been James A. McDivitt, command pilot and the only other crewmember on the mission. Unless Fox managed to spirit a photographer into the capsule—now there’s a conspiracy theory!
I priced out Getty’s image for editorial use on the web: for a period of two years, they claim a price of $173.
The photograph is available—in a scan of the Kodachrome original—at nasaimages.org, a service provided by NASA in conjunction with Rick and Meghan Prelinger’s The Internet Archive.
Chatting with a Getty rights administrator about this image, I brought up the public-domain nature of NASA image licensing. “Ok, so you can feel free to use a image that as needed,” he replied. “However if that image is one that NASA has provided to Getty for licensing, or a image from the Getty site, then the license to it must first be purchased prior to usage.”
NASA’s own reproduction guidelines state that “you may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages,” specifying only minimal restrictions for commercial use: “If the NASA material is to be used for commercial purposes, especially including advertisements, it must not explicitly or implicitly convey NASA’s endorsement of commercial goods or services.”
Getty’s entry for the image notes that it comes from the Hulton Archive, an image collection set up by Sir Edward Hulton, who published Picture Post, which was the LIFE of midcentury Britain. Surely, the image has its source in the image files of the Picture Post, to whom a negative would have been furnished by NASA public relations. The Hulton Archives include thousands of images, and it’s understandable that those with unique rights profiles might slip through the administrative cracks. But I wonder how many NASA images are claimed by Getty and other commercial image vendors, unintentionally or not. And I wonder how much money has been made from them.
Great post, important point!
It’s posts like these that I just love. It brings up a topic I’ve never even thought of before, and it questions questionable activities.
Thanks for the information. It shall be used well in my future.
I’m certain that there’s a huge amount of public domain content, including NASA images and so on, that is making profit for commercial vendors. I’m not even all that opposed to it, actually — in a way, people are literally paying for their ignorance, or to save time by getting all their material from one place. I do think that those who are committed to providing free content (NASA, the government, libraries and so forth) should do a better job of making their offerings visible and findable and usable, but it sure does take a lot of effort.
Note that the 9/11 report, a government document, was a New York Times bestseller despite being offered for free as a PDF on the commission’s website and elsewhere. Or look at the ProQuest database of the New York Times, which slaps proprietary claims on all kinds of scans of pre-1923 text. Or look at http://www.historicmapworks.com/, where you can get prints and coffee mugs and mousepads of public domain maps scanned from libraries, and where you can also pay a hefty fee of $50-$5,000 per year to “license” an unwatermarked image.
To me, this phenomenon speaks to the actual materiality of digital files. We think of the Getty astronaut image above and the NASA astronaut image above as “the same picture,” but of course they aren’t, literally. My feeling is that Getty has every right to sell and license its image, because it is actually a different object in a different place.
Good points, Amanda, but I think we can have our commons and eat them too. Getty isn’t doing a very good job of conveying the materiality of the image they’re licensing, naming the photographer as a “stringer,” and its origin as a file photo published at Picture Post (and in many other venues) is obscure. And while intellectually I agree that the image is different from the one NASA furnishes today, and that those differences are important, it’s also true that in terms of IP law the differences are not sufficient for Getty to claim a right. On the other hand, NASA’s offer of free use extends to Getty, and the only restriction on commercial use is to avoid implying NASA’s endorsement; there’s nothing stopping me, you, or Getty from offering the image for sale. Ideally, to my mind, they’d at the very least offer useful metadata; beyond that, it wouldn’t kill them to offer PD images for free, as a public service. the image was after all produced at public expense–and Getty’s claim to licensure, as fungible property, adds value to the company even if the number of licenses they sell is trivially small.
Totally agree about Getty’s crappy metadata. And, as I mentioned on Twitter, I could be convinced to lobby for a law requiring notice that items are public domain when they are. Man, that would be SO awesome.
Still, this “it wouldn’t kill them [Getty, right?] to offer PD images for free, as a public service” I think is wrong: I actually think it would kill a lot of commercial vendors’ business to offer PD images for free as a public service. I’m convinced that a lot of such vendors’ stuff is public domain. Ten percent? More? There might be a study, somewhere. That’s a lot of business to lose. I bet those govt-owned Dorothea Lange WPA pictures of Depression migrant workers are in Getty, for instance.
Chasing down rights and pulling permissions costs authors and publishers, too. We could probably go higher than ten percent, too; if we adopt a strong PD paradigm, just about everything in art museums and special collections would count—I believe the courts have determined that digital reproduction, even to exacting standards, isn’t enough to claim unique authorship. So you’re right, it *is* a lot of business to lose—and not only for commercial vendors, but for nonprofit institutional repositories, too. The middle ground you describe—to require notice of a work’s PD status—that seems just about right!
Let’s start a lobby! My dad’s got a barn! :)
A similar situation arises through Kobo. They offer for sale hundreds of public domain titles and even have the audacity to acknowledge that the titles come from the Gutenberg library (where anyone can download them in epub format and load them onto their Kobo ereader for free).
Reminds me of the LIFE photo archives, which originally purported to hold copyright over public domain images published in LIFE (that’s since been corrected, it seems): http://images.google.com/hosted/life
More astronaut appropriation:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/08/astronaut-sues-dido-album-cover
NASA Images is a partnership between NASA and Internet Archive. I’m a board member of Internet Archive, but didn’t start it and don’t run it. My spouse Megan has nothing to do with Internet Archive, other than that they host a whole lot of our public domain film and print material. Just to correct the record.
Duly noted, Rick–thank you for checking in.
just read this after looking at a nasa image – public domain!