UPDATED 01:44 EDT / APRIL 01 2015

Flickr adds Public Domain and CC0 designations, SpaceX first to take the leap

spacexFlickr, the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing platform, has added Public Domain and Creative Commons 0 (CC0) to its list of available copyright designations. Both options will allow users to share their work freely with the public for reuse in any way they desire.  (via Ars Technica)

Flickr has supported Creative Commons since 2004, but while U.S. Government works and historic images from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums have always been in the public domain, the company says it has become aware that its community needed new options for sharing images freely.

Now users can upload images no longer protected by copyright and tag them as being in the public domain or release their copyright for personal work entirely under CC0.

According to Flickr, Elon Musk’s privately-owned space exploration company, SpaceX, was first to take advantage of the new copyright designations.

Last week Musk put hundreds of SpaceX photos up on the company’s Flickr account, releasing them under the Creative Commons license. Unfortunately, this does not allow for some uses, like commercial use for instance. This did not go unnoticed and in an open letter to Musk, Mike Masnick at Techdirt suggested that the SpaceX images should be put in the public domain. Citing Musk’s edict that he would free up all of Tesla’s patents, Masnick maintained that he should apply the same attitude to SpaceX’s images.

People also took to Twitter on the topic:

Musk later responded to other Tweets requesting that the SpaceX images be put in the public domain:

At the time, lacking the availability of a Public Domain or CC0 option on Flickr, Musk had to use the CC-BY designation that, while allowing others to distribute, remix, tweak images, still requires attribution.

As of the time of writing, all SpaceX images on Flickr have been set to Public Domain.

It’s unclear whether the narrative around the licensing of SpaceX’s images or Musk’s decision had any bearing on Flickr’s move to add the new copyright designations.

It’s worth noting that the default setting for all new images uploaded to Flickr is “All Rights Reserved,” but users can change that on an image-by-image basis or for all images in their Account Settings.

Image courtesy SpaceX

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