King Haakon VII of Norway, photographed by David E. Scherman of Life Magazine outside London in 1942.
That the Life photo archive now is available on Google is fantastic news and very impressive. You can sit for hours browsing this treasure. But it’s surprising that there is so little explanation about copyright issues to find here. © Time Inc. is stamped on each photo, and Time says they “are available for free for personal and research purposes”. Does this mean also republishing on personal blogs, like I have taken the liberty to do here? Probably not. But Time knows that people will display the photos on websites, and they won’t go after bloggers who use one or a few images. Since they are selling prints, it’s actually in Time’s interest to have the photos republished on non-commercial websites. A good example of the foggy state of copyright today… The elegant solution here would of course be a Creative Commons license, but maybe there are other obstacles to that?
Another issue is that copyright maybe has expired on some of these photos. And while we’re in photo mode, Flickr Commons continues the good work that started with the Library of Congress photos.
why on earth would the “elegant” solution be a CC licence?
Hi! My point was that with at CC license, Time would get the best of both worlds:
– Free marketing from non-commercial sites that would display photos from the archive
– And they would keep the exclusive right to sell the photos digitally to professional customers and prints to everyone, as they do today
– Additionally, they would ensure that this great photo treasure would be even more widely distributed.
But I’m a dilettante in the complicated world of copyright law, so I might be missing something!