Play to register 'Public domain images sold for a fee' on Wikimedia Commons

Getty Images, a photographic image agency headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA, is a major digital content company that provides 300 million materials such as images and videos that can be used for advertising, advertising, and reporting. Some of the images that Getty Images sells for $ 500 (about 66,000 yen) include public domain images that can be downloaded and used for free, author and journalist Corey Doctorow revealed I was.

Doctorow said on March 19, 2023, 'My latest hobby is finding public domain images that Getty Images sells for $500, looking for high-resolution scans of original publications, and cropping them. , sharpen and add metadata before uploading to Wikimedia Commons,' he tweeted.

My new hobby: finding public domain images that Getty sells for $500, locating hi-rez scans of their original publications, cropping and cleaning them up, adding metadata, and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons.

First one:

https://t.co/GUpgJs6ea0 pic.twitter.com/rIS1B1PH53

— Cory Doctorow (@[email protected]) (@doctorow) March 19, 2023

The picture of the thread telephone attached to the tweet by Mr. Doctorow is a work called ' String Telephone. ' Sold at Getty Images. According to the caption on the sales page, it was drawn by Théodose du Moncel , a 19th-century French physicist and artist. There is a charge for the image, which costs 10,000 yen for a small one, 18,000 yen for a medium size, and 35,000 yen for a large one, but Doctorow has registered it as a public domain work on Wikimedia Commons. I'm here.

A string telephone. Engraving from ''Le Telephone'' by T. De Moncel,... Photo d'actualité - Getty Images
https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/string-telephone-engraving-from-le-telephone-by-t-de-moncel-news-photo/506027675

When asked how he found the original painting, Dr. Doctorow said, ``It's easy if you know the book on it.Getty Images and Alamy can tell you the source of the original on the image sales page. Once you know what book is listed, search the book title on Google Books, Internet Archive library scans, Hathi Trust, NYPL, etc. to find and download high-res PDF scans and use them in your image editing software. Open it with Gimp, adjust the white balance, adjust the orientation, and you're done.'

Doctorow originally said that he had searched for and used public domain images that were sold for a fee, and had deleted them when he used them. For example, the above string telephone image is used in Dr. Doctorow's March 20th column.

Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband | by Cory Doctorow | Mar, 2023 | Medium

Mr. Doctorow, who was repeating these things, decided to register with Wikimedia Commons so that other people could use the images that he found and processed beautifully.

In a thread on Hacker News, a social news site that talked about Mr. Doctorow's tweet, ``I was asked by a biologist if I could use a picture of myself taken as a hobby, so I readily agreed and provided a high-resolution one. Then, the photo was distributed in the public domain.' Or , 'I'm not defending the business of Getty Images, but Getty Images sells a combination of convenience and legal protection. , as long as you follow the terms of the contract, you will be assured in writing that the use of the image is legally permitted.'