Our visual public media - broadcast television, video, DVD and the web - would all have been so much poorer if some nitpicking lawyer or bureaucrat had succeeded in persuading the early NASA management to be more restrictive. This is what makes NASA’s open copyright policy so creditable. Arguments can be made that space images obtained at tremendous cost to tax payers can be owned, copyrighted and managed by those agencies and nations footing the bill.
On strict legal terms, I suppose, creators or finders can be keepers. I haven’t been able to check the policy of Russian, Chinese or Japanese space agencies, and wonder how liberal or restrictive their copyright policies are. Use of material on the website is subject to the terms and conditions outlined below.”Īs we can see, it’s a lot more restrictive than NASA’s. ESA does not grant the right to resell or redistribute any information, documents, images or material from its website or to compile or create derivative works from material on its website.
#ARE NASA IMAGES COPYRIGHT FREE DOWNLOAD#
ESA grants permission to users to visit the site, and to download and copy information, images, documents and materials from the website for users’ personal non-commercial use. “The contents of the ESA Web Portal are intended for the personal and non-commercial use of its users. This is what I found on the European Space Agency’s website: I was curious to see what copyright policy the space agencies of other leading space-faring nations follow. There are some reasonable restrictions on this fair use. Significantly, this includes commercially produced and marketed products, even though NASA’s guidelines make it clear: “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…” This general permission extends to personal Web pages.” You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages. “ NASA still images, audio files and video generally are not copyrighted. This is what the NASA official website currently has to say about it: This is what enables me to use space images on my blog – and keeps tens of thousands of such images in the public domain.
#ARE NASA IMAGES COPYRIGHT FREE FREE#
Yet, early on, NASA adopted a very far-sighted, public spirited policy that all its space images would be made available free of copyrights to anyone, anywhere on the planet. It’s the national space agency of a single country, financed by tax payers of that country. Contrary to what some people believe, NASA is not a world space agency. It has cost space agencies – primarily NASA, the American space agency – literally billions of dollars over the decades to capture and deliver these images that we happily, freely bandy around. These are now part of our popular culture and represent a major educational resource. Yet no one had the capability – and vantage point – to take such images until satellites were launched into orbit, and later astronauts followed.īeginning in the 1960s, thousands of stunning images - showing our planet in space, as well as the Moon and other celestial bodies in our Solar System - have entered the public domain.
As the Space Age completes 50 years today, 4 October 2007, we have at least two generations of humans who take images like this one completely for granted.
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