SpaceX has transferred photos under the Creative Commons license

CC BY-NC 2.0 means no commercial use.

Added 2015-03-23: Ilon Mask said that now all photos of SpaceX are in the public domain, that is, they can be used for absolutely any purpose. The data in this article is presented on March 20.



SpaceX space company created an account on the Flickr website and began uploading its photos there under the license CC BY-NC 2.0 . This license gives all of humanity the opportunity to use SpaceX photos, although it imposes restrictions on commercial purposes.



Last month, some technical publications drew attention to the problem of copyright of SpaceX photos ( 1 , 2 ). For the first time, EFF Parker Higgins, an activist, pointed to the problem. Every day we can see various beautiful images of the cosmos in the media, books and movies. Very often, these pictures were taken at NASA. And the matter is not only in quantity, but also in the nature of content licensing. NASA is a US government agency, so images and videos of the agency and its departments are freely published and distributed as public domain. But with photos of SpaceX is not so clear.



Being in the public domain means that anyone can use NASA photos and videos for any purpose, including extracting benefits from them. In practice, this is as follows: most of the photographs of the Hubble telescope can be printed on a T-shirt and sold, and NASA archival photography can be freely inserted into a documentary film without permission. Or you can take the record of Neil Armstrong, galloping across the moon, and slam green men into the background to feed this content to conspiracy theorists. And it does not need to make deductions in favor of NASA - US taxpayers have already paid for the activities of the agency.

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And indeed there are photographs that are often published, which inspire people who can be seen in various media, on goods or in derivative works, but for which you do not need to pay - they are available for everyone to use. Suffice it to recall at least the " Blue Marble ." One of the most replicated photographs in history was made by the Apollo 17 astronauts, and the freedom of distribution in part ensured its popularity.







Not all space agencies so faithfully observe the principles of the freedom of their content. For example, the ESA publishes photos from the main cameras of the Rosetta only six months later. A month ago, the SpaceX position was unclear. In general, the problems here begin: who owns the photos taken from the SpaceX device? Apparently, SpaceX, because it is a private company. And if the flight of this device was paid for by NASA, that is, with taxpayers' money? Then these photos should go into public domain.



The latter is unlikely, because NASA already had private contractors who rented the time of the Hubble telescope. And they retain the rights to the images made. Lawyers Whitney Merrill and Andrew Rush believe that space photos belong to SpaceX. A NASA representative told the Motherboard publication that the company Ilona Mask retains the rights to his photos, and the agency’s rules do not work here. Of course, one can hardly imagine a situation in which Musk will chase T-shirt vendors, but how will the situation change in 30-50 years?





One example of an interesting photograph of SpaceX



After the publication of the article, which drew attention to the problems of space copyright, a SpaceX representative contacted the Motherboard and assured that this issue was being resolved. The company has opened an account in the Flickr photo service and now publishes there its photos. License used is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 . This means that anyone can distribute these photos and create derivative works based on them, but at the same time authorship should be reported, and commercial use is impossible.



The terms of this license differ from what is guaranteed in the public domain, but this is better than nothing. Let the photos from this Flickr account not be sold without first contacting the authors, but now schoolchildren and students can safely embed some SpaceX images into their presentations and reports.



Photos are available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacexphotos