Elon Musk And SpaceX Just Backed Down From Earlier Promise To Release SpaceX Photos To The Public Domain
from the this-is-disappointing dept
Well, this is very disappointing. Back in 2015, you may recall that there was an effort to get SpaceX to put its photos into the public domain. As you hopefully know, all NASA photos, as works of the US government, are in the public domain — which let us post photos like this one:
But as more and more spaceflight gets privatized, there were concerns that future space photos may increasingly get locked up behind copyright.
After an initial outcry, SpaceX initially agreed to use a Creative Commons license, but one that restricted usage to non-commercial efforts. As we pointed out at the time, that really wasn’t good enough. Why does SpaceX need copyright as incentive to take photographs?
After people pointed this out to Elon Musk, he said that they had a good point and that he changed SpaceX’s policy to dedicate all the photos to the public domain. And that’s how it’s been for over four and a half years.
Until now. As Vice’s Motherboard reports, SpaceX has now gone back to a more restrictive Creative Commons license, one that says no commercial use is allowed. While using CC is better than going all out with full restrictions, this is still a very disappointing move. The company has told reporters that news organizations can still use the images, and many will have to rely on that promise. While Creative Commons has put a lot of effort into “clarifying” what is meant by “non-commercial” in recent years, including highlighting that for profit news orgs should still be able to make use of such works, that’s not really been tested in court.
And, considering that Elon Musk has an occasionally antagonistic relationship with the press, you could see an unfortunate situation in which he decides to go after a journalism organization that upsets him by claiming that they were misusing the “NC” part of the license on a SpaceX photo.
So, once again, we have to ask: why is SpaceX doing this? Why is it going back on Musk’s earlier promise that all SpaceX photos would be in the public domain? Why does SpaceX need the restrictions of copyright as an incentive to take photos? Isn’t just being able to get to space enough incentives to take some photos?
Filed Under: cc licenses, copyright, elon musk, photos, public domain, space, space images
Companies: spacex
Comments on “Elon Musk And SpaceX Just Backed Down From Earlier Promise To Release SpaceX Photos To The Public Domain”
It doesn’t. That fact makes this whole situation much more awful — because Musk/Space X knows it doesn’t need to copyright Space X images and they’re doing it anyway.
Why?
Just to show that they can.
Re: Why?
Can they? Are these photos being taken by employees remotely controlling the spacecraft, or are they automated? There has to be some amount of creativity to get copyright. Anything done via automation wouldn’t count.
Re: Re: Why?
"Anything done via automation wouldn’t count."
Does that include the automatic light meter and exposure control or does the automation have to initiate the automatic shutter control?
Is any onboard post processing considered to be this automation you refer to?
Does the employee have to use old school film camera that lacks light meter and controlling circuitry?
Re: Re: Why?
Totally false. If you put a camera into orbit and it takes pics, you own the copyright on those pics. See also: trail cameras. They are totally automated. The only thing the owner does is mount the camera to a tree, but he still gets copyright.
You may be being confused by the monkey case. But there, the monkey pushed the button to snap the photo, and monkey’s can’t have copyright.
Re: Re: Re: Why?
It came up in the monkey case, but the law doesn’t forbid monkeys from having copyright. It says only works created by humans can. From BoingBoing:
Also see § 313.2 "Works That Lack Human Authorship" from the source document (PDF):
And § 313.4(B) "De Minimis Authorship":
If a photographer moved a spacecraft for non-mission-related reasons to get a great shot, that could be copyrightable. If it’s just data generated with no human intervention as a side-effect of a practical mission, it’s not.
Their Sepcialty
Space-X’s Specialty was revenue on re-usable rockets.
Now they are expanding their potential revenue stream to re-useable photographs.
Isn't the reason obvious?
Transporting people into space is really an expensive payload that few people will be able to afford.
The real money is in transporting phones into space. If all those phone photographs would be in the Public Domain, the market would collapse.
Just think of it: the first space elevator could be designed with a phone-size payload and be available for rental to meagre two-digit millionaires as a selfie stick.
Re: Isn't the reason obvious?
Humor detected, but phone picture quality does not rationalize the expense of putting them there.
Re: Re: Isn't the reason obvious?
Did you seriously use the phrase "rationalize the expense" in connection with a smartphone just now?
All NASA photos are not works of the US Government
A large number of NASA missions are done on contract, for example at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). But, JPL employees are not US Government employees. Most people just read the copyright law section that says:
but forget to read the definition of a US Government work
The determining factor is whether the person that would be granted the copyright is a US Government employee, not whether the US Government pays for it. Contractors and grantees are not US Government employees. I bring this up partly because this is a pet peeve of mind, but mostly because assuming everything the US Government pays for is not subject to copyright minimizes the large amount of hard work done at NASA to create the carrots and sticks that cause so many contract missions to make their pictures freely available. It is NOT a simple consequence of copyright law. See here
Re: All NASA photos are not works of the US Government
If the contract that the contractor works under is paid for by the government, they are a government employee. Edward Snowden was a government employee no matter what anyone may say. The fact that the government is trying to get around the bloat that is entrenched with GS employees by creating a subcategory called contractors doesn’t stop them from being employed by and for the government. Some government employees get all of their benefits and pay through third-party contractors, partly to help obscure the spies that do the same. If the government can argue that uber and lyft contractors are employees, the same thing applies to them.
Re: All NASA photos are not works of the US Government
I believe the phrase "work for hire" would apply here.
Re: Re: All NASA photos are not works of the US Government
It’s kind of true, in that a government contract can demand that the contractor assign any copyrights from the work to the government, but that doesn’t always happen and even if it does, the work is copyrighted and the copyright is owned by the government which can put restrictions on its use. It can get really complicated, but the bottom line is that work the government pays for (but not done by government employees) can be copyrighted and the copyrights are enforced. It has been litigated (I think the most famous case is Schnapper v. Foley, 667 F.2d 102 (D.C.
Cir. 1981), and everyone who has tried to claim that a copyright by a government contractor is invalid due to the "work of the government" clause has lost.
Re: Re: Re: All NASA photos are not works of the US Government
There is a difference between what they demand and what they get.
Back in the day, some government contracting offices were making noise about how they were owed the proceeds from the airline mileage programs used by contractor employees.
Re: Re: Re: All NASA photos are not works of the US Government
The point you’re trying to argue and the point everyone else is making including this article are worlds apart from each other.
Yes, a company contracted by the government to create something can assign that copyright to the government and the government can then own the copyright in that thing.
That is NOT the same thing as the government hiring an individual under contract to work for them for a short period of time. That is the same thing as the government using one of its own employees and at that point it cannot hold any copyright in whatever it used that contractor to create.
At the very least the case you cite doesn’t prove this point. It shows an example of the former (contracting a company), not the latter (hiring a contractor and then using them to create the work).
Re: Re: Re:2 All NASA photos are not works of the US Governme
And thus something the government pays for is not in the public domain. The original post stated that ALL NASA photos are in the public domain. That is false. Some are, some aren’t.
Sure, a government employee is an employee no matter how long the employment lasts. But most NASA contractors (for example JPL) are not temporary government employees at all, they are strictly employees of the contractor.
I’m not sure exactly what distinction you are trying to make. I’m not sure if there are any examples of someone who becomes an employee by contract. In any event most of NASA contracting is an example of contracting a company, which I think you agree means that any work is not automatically in the public domain.
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90% of Elon Schmuck proclamations are BS
90% of Con-artist po-head Elon Schmuck "proclamations", forcasts and promises are always Bullshit. The Other 10% left is Vaporware. Just look at his history.
Re: 90% of Elon Schmuck proclamations are BS
Yeah, he’ll never get some kind of "rocket" into "space", the very idea is ludicrous. Electric cars? everyone hates those.
Why doesn’t everyone understand this? SpaceX launches are really filmed on a sound stage in Nevada. Yes, I know, there is no agreement about whether those shiny boxes under the Tesla cars hold rows of hamster wheels, or the long-suppressed 5000-mile-per-gallon carburetor (plus a pint of gasoline). But we mustn’t let mere technical details get in the way of hallucinogen-driven malice.
Re: Boeing, Boeing, Boeing BOEING LIVES!
Thank you for the context. There is good reasons that we have depended on Litton, Ling-Temco-Vought, Thomson-Ramos-Woldrige, Hughes, Chrysler, North-American Rocketdyne et.al. for 70 years.
Convair’s ‘Atlas’, with the first stage built by Energomash in Russia, is taking Americans to the ISS sometime next year, replacing Russia’s Soyuz, built by OKB-1. Orbital Science’s ‘Antares’ (built by Yuzhnoye in Russia) is delivering food to the ISS on and off. McDonald-Douglas’ Delta IV, brought back after mothballed in 2018, is Boeing’s workhorse for the rest of the DOD’s launch requests (& Atlas,having merged with Lockheed). SpaceX is fake.
Market economy/capitalism; cutting down to one suppler, one take-over at a time; that’s so Americana.
P.S. 1,000,000 homes bought by one LLC in the last ten years and held out off the market in Los Angeles: PRESTO: homelessness and rising rents: market economy/capitalism, so Americana.
"why is SpaceX doing this?"
…ask them?
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Oh my, might want to do a wellness check on poor Mike Masnick after this doozy:
https://variety.com/2019/music/news/cox-communications-music-copyright-suit-verdict-1203449254/
Re: Re:
I was following some of that case. I am surprised it came out like that.
I guess I don’t know how much about how cox handled its infringement notices. I do know I have never met anyone who has received a notice though because I expected my old landlord to get one before he passed away. He did subscribed to a different ISP.
He left the wifi password to default and everyone used it, including neighbors. It was his router and internet connection to leave the default password on I guess.
Re: Re: Re:
Cox is stupid and did wrong things. It really isn’t about copyright, it’s about telecom/ISPs acting badly.
Re: Re: Re:
*I was following some of that case. I am surprised it came out like that.
I guess I don’t know much about how cox handled its infringement notices. I do know I have never met anyone who has received a notice though because I expected my old landlord to get one before he passed away. He did subscribe to a different ISP however.
He left the wifi password to default and everyone used it, including neighbors. It was his router and internet connection to leave the default password on I guess.*
I miss my old grammar checker and am tired.
Re: Re:
You don’t even qualify high enough for boring, you know.
I am honestly not sure why this matters. It’s just another demo of Musk being Musk. Why does anyone need SpaceX photography? Why can’t anyone keep their own photos?
Re: Re:
Launch yourself into space often, do you?
Obviously SpaceX is free to keep photos it takes to itself if it wants to. The point here is that because it’s so difficult to get photos from space and there’s lots of interest in them and it’s free for anyone who is already in space anyway to take basically as many as they want it would be nice if they’d let everyone use them.
Re: Re:
Would you really want photos of space be under copyright? Methinks thou takest public domain space photos for granted.
Never trust a pedo guy.
Mindless all-rights-reserved culture
I’d apply Hanlon’s Razor and say that this is the result of Musk’s promise being reviewed with horror by some very shortsighted corporate policy types. "All rights reserved" appears in so many idiotic places that it’s hard not to believe that many people think of "intellectual property" in security terms–if even a small component is left uncopyrighted or untrademarked, the whole system is "vulnerable". Or something.
Space should not be privatized…
This is exactly why I feared space travel being privatized as opposed to being run by Nation-states: Private actors have an incentive to copyright, whereas governments (at least ostensibly democratic ones) have an incentive to put the space images in the public domain. The fact that NASA’s space achievements are in the public domain meant great things for culture and society: it meant that I could:
-go on a cruise ship and see a photo of Saturn there
-see museum exhibits about space
-watch Apollo 11 NASA footage anywhere I wanted
-use the space photographs as album art
And the list goes on and on. These are things I couldn’t do without a license as far as private space travel is concerned. This is why I feared the idea, even at the time when mainstream culture embraced Elon Musk and private space travel. Hopefully people will wake up to it.
"noncommercial" clause not been tested in court?
BTW, Mr. Masnick, you made this claim:
However, you provided no court cases to back up what you’re saying. Care to educate me?
Re: "noncommercial" clause not been tested in court?
Which particular part of "not tested in court" did you not understand?