Updated at 12:50 p.m. ET
SpaceX has put all of its images in the public domain — as the result of a tweet.
CEO Elon Musk tweeted Saturday:
SpaceX Photos Are Now Available Under a Creative Commons License http://t.co/OgHJYimuCU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2015
Among the responses was this one:
@elonmusk Why not just public domain? What is there to lose?
— Ben (@Pandoomic) March 21, 2015
Musk's reply:
@Pandoomic Just changed them to full public domain
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2015
SpaceX posted new images on its website and on Flickr. The decision puts SpaceX in the company of NASA, which also has its imagesin the public domain.
What does that mean for us? It means that we can share images likes the ones SpaceX posted on its website this past weekend.
So what's the difference?
As the Stanford Universities Libraries notes:
"The term 'public domain' refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it."
Creative Commons, on the other hand, allowsthe distribution of copyrighted work. It offers a range of licenses from CC BY, which allows "others [to] distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation"; to CC BY-NC-ND, which "only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially."
We should note here that our Multimedia team points out that while Musk has said the pictures are now in the public domain, they still appear to be labeled CC-BY, the most accommodating of Creative Commons licenses.
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