As SpaceX becomes one of the biggest commercial companies in the space industry, it'll also become a source for people to use to look at the stars and space anomalies that make up our view of the cosmos. But what is the legal status of such images?
SpaceX posted a series of photos last week onto Flickr under the Creative Commons photo license. This will allow for anyone to use SpaceX's photos for any purpose. However, Creative Commons allows SpaceX to hold onto some of its image rights, and requires users to attribute the source to SpaceX if they want to use these new images. People are also not allowed to sell products with the images on them.
However, someone tweeted at SpaceX CEO Elon Musk asking why the photos weren't originally public domain. The tweet caused Musk to change its status. As of March 21, the photos are now public domain and available for anyone to use.
This is notable, especially when you consider how NASA has handled photos in the past. All photos taken by NASA currently exist in the public domain, which means that they are available to everyone for whatever function they want. If a user desired, he or she could sell that photo of Neil Armstrong on the moon for profit without having to worry about whether it was illegal.
NASA's current photo copyright is because of NASA being a tax-funded project. This is the only reason that Americans have the ability to use images such as the Blue Marble or The Pillars of Creation for non-space reasons, as well as make a profit off of such products.
While NASA's tax-funded status requires it to host its photos in the public domain, SpaceX is under no such requirement.
"Just because they're operating on behalf of NASA does not necessarily mean the copyright of their images are owned by NASA or the U.S. government. When SpaceX is operating as a NASA contractor, generally any of the copyrightable stuff they create is subject to copyright protections," intellectual property lawyer Andrew Rush told Motherboard. While this may be true, it didn't stop Musk from changing the photo's legal status.
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