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Google To Host 10M Images From Life Magazine's Archive
Posted by
kdawson
on Tuesday November 18, @05:52PM
from the that's-life-what's-life dept.
from the that's-life-what's-life dept.
CWmike and other readers alerted us to Google's announcement that it was making available 10 million images from Life magazine's archives dating back to the 1750s. (Most of the news accounts covering this announcement refer to Life's "photos," and none mention that photography wasn't invented until early in the 19th century.) Only a small percentage of the images — including newly digitized images from photos and etchings — have even been published. The rest have been "sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints." At this point about 20% of Life's archive is online; the rest is promised within months.
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IT: A 1941 Paper-and-Pencil Cipher 52 comments
Schneier's blog links to a photo of a 68-year-old code being employed in wartime, with a plausible explanation of what is going on in it. (The photo is from the Life Magazine archive we discussed when it went live.) "What you see here is a photo that never should have been allowed to be taken, and one which provides an amazing, one-of-a-kind glimpse into the world of WWII espionage and counter-espionage. As far as I can tell, what is shown in this picture is an FBI agent in New York encrypting a message, passed from 'DUNN'... through Sebold, prior to transmitting that message to Germany via shortwave radio. ... [T]his appears to be real cryptology at work."
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Public domain? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder was the copyright is for these. Are they all public domain?
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Re:Public domain? (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what the copyright is...
damn non-editable Slashdpt
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This is hotter (Score:4, Funny)
For hot pictures, I lean more towards this [google.com] or this [google.com].
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Who cares about copyright when you got pictures this hot [google.com].
Oooh, vintage pr0n!
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40M images & double posters with beautiful bunnies!
You've missed it (Score:3, Interesting)
Stories that are told that are retold become our culture. If the stories are owned and cannot be retold they might be lucrative, but they can't become culture. Copyright is the theft of culture from the future. Copyright must be abolished [abolishcopyright.com] because as implemented it prevents [allbusiness.com] the fair use [youtube.com] of works long in the public domain [gutenberg.org].
This is a good place to thank Larry for keeping up the good fight. God Bless you Larry [softwarefreedom.org], I hope you win and I'm glad to continue to donate to your cause [softwarefreedom.org].
Victorian domain. (Score:4, Funny)
Hey everybody! Ankles!
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Re:Public domain? (Score:4, Funny)
damn non-editable Slashdpt
Now that is just funny...
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Copyrights vary (Score:5, Informative)
The copyrights for previously-unpublished works vary, Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia probably have the answers you are looking for.
In general, anything created more than 120 years ago in the United States is in the public domain. Works that weren't "work for hire" live various-numbers-of-years after the death of the photographer but there is a presumption of public domain after 120 years unless it can be shown the photographer was alive "recently enough" that the copyright hasn't lapsed. There's also a "presumption of death on or before insert-date-here" under certain other circumstances.
I don't have the rules for previously-unpublished works-for-hire handy, but I think that for stuff not published before now, anything before 1923 is in the public domain in the USA. There were special rules in place a few years ago to "encourage" publishing previously unpublished works but I think that is over with.
If Life had done this during that special window, a lot of stuff that would have had only the remaining copyright would have enjoyed extended protection.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This image [google.com], among others, claims "© Time Inc." despite its 1860 date, so I wouldn't be quick to call the new archive a gift. They clearly want to (re)assert copyright on the pics.
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I also noticed that when you click on the picture, you get the 'real' full res picture. However, the full res picture has a big ugly 'LIFE' logo stamped in the lower corner. Gee, thanks for screwing up the picture for me!
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Re:Public domain? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes and no.
They are public domain in so far as the originals are long out of copyright. Any magazine you had dated prior to about 1920 (I forget the exact year) has fallen into the public domain and you'd be free to post articles. However, derivative works, namely the scans/data in this case, are probably recent enough to still be under copyright. Yes, they would probably be considered to be insufficiently distinct to be true "derivative works" with a separate copyright, but proving that would require a costly legal battle.
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Re:Public domain? (Score:4, Informative)
From
http://englishhistory.net/tudor/art.html [englishhistory.net]
The Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd., Plaintiff, - versus - Corel Corporation, et ano., Defendants.
97 Civ. 6232 (LAK)
Their decision was one of the most important copyright decision affecting museums ever filed. The decision was based on both US and UK copyright law.
WHO WAS INVOLVED IN THE CASE & WHAT WAS IT ABOUT?
The Bridgeman Art Library had made photographic reproductions of famous works of art from museums around the world (works already in the public domain.) The Corel Corporation used those reproductions for an educational CD-ROM without paying Bridgeman. Bridgeman claimed copyright infringement.
WHAT DID THE COURT DECIDE?
The Court ruled that reproductions of images in the public domain are not protected by copyright if the reproductions are slavish or lacking in originality.
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Re:Public domain? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. [wikipedia.org] was a U.S. court decision. It's not a precedent affecting the U.K. I have a web site with my free physics textbooks, and I've received nastygrams from a U.K. museum about a contemporary portrait of Isaac Newton that's reproduced on my site. I didn't worry much about it, because I'm in the U.S., but they and their lawyers did seem to believe that the law was on their side in the U.K. (or maybe they were just bluffing). The WP article has some specific discussion of this at the end.
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Damn (Score:5, Funny)
Digital photography really sucked [google.com] back then!
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Actually, I think their digital photography was quite [google.com] good [google.com]!
Good for comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
Its good to know we can compare [new-york-city-travel.net] what the market looked [google.com] like when the crash finally happens.
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find using google image search (Score:3, Informative)
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10,000,000 images, not megapixels (Score:4, Informative)
That's 10,000,000 images, not 10 megapixels. Images will be standard 160x120 internet resolution with watermarks & popups.
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Re:It's lifelike pictures Jim (Score:5, Insightful)
Life-like indeed. It's magnificent.
I grew up learning about the world from Life and National Geographic. We were poor - pre-transistor days, couldn't even afford a radio -- but we had the media at our fingertips. I remember my father's part in WWII from pictures he showed me of places he'd been, in old copies of Life. I watched as the first seven astronauts were chosen. I watched the last moments of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King and watched an immense culture change from the pages of Life. The ability of Life photographers to capture the eyes of people and stories and places has never been equalled to my mind.
The fact that Google has arranged with the owners of all this Life Magazine material to put the archive online for the rest of you makes me feel a good bit better about Google's place in the Internet.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Lifelike... you betcha. I've been dying to get my hands on some Margaret Bourke-White images without having to pay Getty Images a few grand per print. Her pictures give a lifelike experience of what it was like to be in so many historical places back in the 40's. It's good that I can finally view these images without having to deall with GI's rediculous pricing policies.
Getty Images has long been the world's largest intellectual property holder. While the general public can get a hold of some of their
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Arrgghhh... Scratch what I said before. New master, same slavery. The medium-view images are nice to look at but I tried blowing one up to a decent size and it's pretty heavy on artifacts. The high rez version has a nice big TIME watermark on it. However, the option to fram any print at a somewhat reasonable price ($80-$110 depending on size) is definitely a plus, and I think I may still act on it. It's still about a tenth of the price I was getitng from GI to get a full res print.