The point of the public domain is that anyone can do anything with it, including sell it, so in a way, it makes sense that the Corbis image-library is full of high-priced Library of Congress images.
But it's also unquestionably a ripoff to sell people things for $1,735 (the price for getting a Corbis license to a public domain LoC image in TV and online) and not bothering to mention that you can get exactly the same image, absolutely free, from the Library of Congress itself.
We want people to build services that add value to the public domain, making it easier to search and work with. Corbis's clip-art search is pretty good, but no better than Google Image Search, the Internet Archive, or Flickr's search (all of which index the LoC and allow you to restrict your search to freely usable work).
I mention Corbis because I was stunned by the number of free public domain images it sells, such as this image of the turret of the battleship USS Monitor. Corbis will sell you this image for between $110 (for internal use only) to $1,735 for TV and Internet. Exactly how they get to 1,735 and not 1,700 is a mystery. The bigger mystery is how they sell it at all, as this same image is available for free from the Library of Congress. It's the picture at the top of this column.
In fact this whole page appears to all be images ripped off from the Library of Congress with no attributions.
Does Corbis ever tell its customers that these images belong in the public domain? I see no evidence of it. Because of the outrageous prices for something that should be free, you assume they own the pictures somehow. It's impossible to own these public-domain images. The company should be ashamed of itself.
Stock Photos Will Drive Photoshop Use Into the Ground [John C Dvorak/PC Mag]
report this ad
Today, the EFF and a coalition of organizations and individuals asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to explore fair labeling rules that would require retailers to warn you when the products you buy come locked down by DRM (“Digital Rights Management” or “Digital Restrictions Management”).
They’ve “expressly prohibited” turning anything from the Olympics into “animated formats such as animated GIFs (i.e. GIFV), GFY, WebM, or short video formats such as Vines.”
20 years ago, Congress ordered the FCC to begin the process of allowing Americans to buy their pay TV boxes on the open market (rather than every American household spending hundreds of dollars a year renting a trailing-edge, ugly, energy-inefficient, badly designed box that is increasingly the locus of networked attacks that expose both the […]
Everything short of a ticket to Canada is here. Read on for the top 3 things you need to do to survive if ‘President Trump’ becomes real life.Start Your Own Business—Not Brought to You By Trump University This legitimate course bundle (they’ll even show you their tax returns) will teach you to make major cash without answering to […]
This tiny computer isn’t just cutest thing we ever did see, it’s actually incredibly powerful too. If you play your cards right, you can program Raspberry Pi (no relation to actual, delicious pie) to control physical objects on your command.You’ll just need a Raspberry Pi (duh) and a few courses to learn how to use […]
Sometimes a round of drinks ends in late night karaoke, body shots, and waking up to a tiger in your hotel room. We get it. It happens. The important thing is that we never put ourselves in danger of a dreaded DUI or worse, put others in danger too. Take the guesswork out of it […]
report this ad
