Thursday 19 June 2008

Smithsonian place copyright free images online

There's a great deal of debate at the moment concerning copyright and how it affects us now and how it will affect us in the future. After the recent announcement (that actually deserves a blog post all of its own) that the Associated Press expects people to pay to use quotations of more than five words and thereby making a mockery of the fair use that we have all embraced, it's refreshing to see that there are others trying to make it easier to use material.

The Smithsonian Institution now has a flickr page with hundreds and hundreds of images with no copyright attached.

Example: Chicago Library floor plan, including two retiring rooms and two binderies!

2 comments:

Angie Donoghue said...

Is that somewhere to retire to once you've been bound up?!

Angie Donoghue said...

There are several public collections putting stuff into Flickr Commons now http://www.flickr.com/commons

The Library of Congress, Brooklyn Museum, Powerhouse. Lots of the images are copyright expired, but check the permissions if you want to reuse.