It’s an exciting time for photographs from space. Last month, when Elon Musk’s privately held company SpaceX posted photos taken during a successful satellite launch, I noted that, unlike every picture NASA has ever taken, these wouldn’t enter the public domain immediately by default. It may have been an unintended side effect of the copyright rule about government works, but for whatever reason the public domain grew with each space photo, and that would be stopping. That’s a bummer, and I called for Elon Musk to fix it by dedicating his company’s new photos to the public domain.
But then another remarkable thing happened. When Musk tweeted about putting those photos online, somebody replied suggesting the public domain—and then Musk agreed. It was a remarkable exchange, and just a few minutes later he declared that he’d changed the license.
There was some confusion, as Flickr doesn’t generally allow photos to be marked as truly public domain—that would require a CC0 waiver, or a declaration that the photos otherwise have no restrictions—so on that platform they were instead set to the most permissive license available, Creative Commons Attribution. Jessamyn West wrote a great post explaining how that meant that the photos weren’t really in the public domain, for some purposes.
But on SpaceX’s own site, they are clearly marked with a CC0 waiver. And as such, they’ve been uploaded to platforms like the Wikimedia Commons, where they can bear the same freedoms. This may be a small campaign—targeting just one company, and not changing any systemic policies—but the victory is real and exciting. Thank you, Elon Musk, for setting an example and helping to grow the public domain.
Over at Wired, I wrote a piece earlier this month responding to reports from Tor users that they were having trouble using Twitter anonymously. It bears noting that we don’t really know what exactly Twitter’s up to, but given the timing of these events (and the fact that they can be consistently, if not universally, reproduced), it seems that this might be an attempt to crack down on abuse.
Not only will that not work, but it would do real harm to valuable speech that relies on anonymity. From the article:
Unfortunately, some voices can be so profoundly silenced by a pierced veil of anonymity that they won’t be around to protest unannounced updates. For instance, activists and journalists in countries where Twitter is forbidden use Tor to circumvent the censorship technology that blocks the site, and to do so without being traceable by the national internet service providers and phone network operators. Changes that make it harder to use Twitter and Tor in combination end up doing real harm to some of the speech that is most marginalized.
The fact that we can’t tell for sure whether Twitter has targeted this speech intentionally raises more issues about the transparency we need to see in online algorithms. But even if this is an unintentional side-effect of a different policy, it’s important to recognize that hindering anonymous speech in any case comes at a great cost.
There are no Google results for the tag, so it looks like it hasn’t been documented, but it seems like a pretty low-tech way to keep possibly insensitive ads off a very sensitive story—an admirable effort. It’s interesting in part because it’s almost an acknowledgement that ads are invasive and uncomfortable. They cross over into the intolerable range when we’re emotionally vulnerable from a tragic story. Advertisers know this too, and the New York Times might stipulate in contracts they’ll try to keep ads off sensitive pages.
If I had to guess, I’d say this is probably a manual switch in their CMS. It would be interesting to see what sorts of stories get dubbed unfit for ads, though scraping enough article pages to get that information might raise some eyebrows on that side of the paywall.
(This information, by the way, doesn’t have to be exposed for keeping ads off pages they serve. But it could help with debugging, and definitely could be useful for syndication and maybe even displaying in official apps.)
Since I originally posted this yesterday, two interesting things have happened. One is that current and former Times employees have confirmed my guess that this is a manual CMS switch (dating back to at least 2003), and people familiar with the CMSes at other publications like The Guardian have said there are similar systems in place.
The other thing is that the tragic story that prompted this took a turn for the worse, and the deaths that were once suspected have been confirmed. The HTML tag has been updated from "noads" to "tragedy", which employees have confirmed is the third and final position on the switch.
Throughout the month of February, I thought it would be fun to share something cool from the public domain each day. I didn’t quite hit all 28 days—here and there I’d go a little too long without getting to my computer—but I ended up with a collection of really cool things.
I shared them on Twitter with the hashtag #pdtotd, which I imagined stood for “public domain thing of the day,” but I never explained what I was doing. My friend Zara took a look at it and guessed it actually stood for “public domain treasure of the day,” which seems like a better fit. Here are some of the things I shared.
1. Images from the New York World-Telegram & Sun
The NY W-T&S dedicated a collection of photos to the public domain, including portraits of civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This seemed like an appropriate way to kick off Black History Month.
2. Extinct Birds (1907)
Beautiful pictures of birds already extinct over a century ago, scanned by the Internet Archive and hosted on Flickr.
3. Anti-Suffrage postcards
As I tweeted, the early 20th-century anti-Suffrage movement had “strong misandry game”. These historical postcards are interesting artifacts and freely available.
4. Highlights from the New York Public Library’s maps collection
Every 10 days, Unsplash releases 10 new high quality, high-res photos into the public domain. They’ve been doing it for almost two years now, and have quite a collection.
The Video Cellar collects movies that have fallen into the public domain or that were never subject to copyright restrictions, as a popular YouTube channel.
11. 3D stereograms of Neanderthal skulls
One of the finds from the Public Domain Review’s excellent essay collection, the story behind the GIFs is even more impressive than the images themselves.
12. Fantasmagori (1908)
This is probably the first ever animated film, and it’s delightfully silly and strange. It wouldn’t take much to make this feel very modern and new.
13. Animal sounds from the Tierstimmenarchiv
The Berlin Natural History Museum has an animal sounds archive posted online, with 600 sounds from a wide variety of animals. Some are very mundane, but many are quite exotic. (h/t to Zara on this one.)
Thomas Edison’s patents were bound together in a book, which was scanned many years later by the Internet Archive. The illustrations are quite striking.
16. Early US currency
The $20 bill has looked about the same throughout my entire life, but it went through some really significant changes 150 years ago.
17. DOT pictograms
Developed in 1974, these images are now a standard visual language. As with most standards, it works better when it’s free for everybody to use.
18. The USDA’s Pomological Watercolor Collection
Over 7,500 watercolors from around the turn of the 20th century, depicting various species of fruits and nuts, and commissioned for the US government. This is an amazing collection.
19. Tokaido Gojusan-eki Hachiyama Edyu, 1848
From the National Agricultural Library’s special collection comes this 1848 book of illustrations of full-size scenes and dwarf potted plants.
20. Screenshots of the Superfish vulnerability
In order to get legitimate information out about this security vulnerability as quickly as possible, @ErrataRob committed his screenshots to the public domain so journalists writing on deadline wouldn’t have to worry about getting in touch for permission.
22. Free Music Archive’s Revitalize Music Contest entries
All of the entries to this contest are new covers of public domain tunes. Entrants were required to release their new recordings into the public domain as well.
I wrote a piece for a new-ish publication calledRatter about the impending copyright trial between Pharrell, Robin Thicke, and the estate of Marvin Gaye, about whether the song “Blurred Lines” infringes on “Got To Give It Up.” In particular, the judge has done some unusual things in terms of what is allowable evidence, given that the Gaye song predates the lifting of notice-and-registration requirements, so only the material in the deposited copy of the sheet music is covered by copyright, under the 1909 Act. From my piece:
But in the last week or so, the docket filings have been piling up and the judge has changed course on that position. The Gaye estate had already filed mash-ups of the two songs to demonstrate how similar they were. Perhaps inspired by those recordings, the judge suggested an unusual and uniquely modern twist: both sides could try submitting versions of “Got To Give It Up” that consist of only the copyrighted elements of the song. In other words, both sides should agree how to distil “Got To Give It Up” down to its basic copyrighty essence — a fire mixtape of pure copyrightium.
Both sides eventually agreed to this condition and edited together the versions of “Got To Give It Up” the jury is likely to hear. If it’s not written down in the sheet music it’s off the table, meaning that the courtroom version of “Got To Give It Up” likely sounds like the MIDI version that auto-played on a Geocities home page, or a rendition by the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese.
Since that was published, my Ratter editor Kate was able to get and publish a copy of the actual courtroom recordings, and we were relieved to hear they sound about as weird as we’d hoped.
In a sense, I think this case mirrors Aereo, but for music. That is to say, it’s undisputed that Pharrell and Thicke wanted to emulate the sound of “Got To Give It Up,” and attempted to do so in a way that deliberately complied with the law. One of the perverse outcomes of Aereo is that it creates the sense that a careful compliance with the law might be deemed a violation—”too cute by half,” maybe, or a Rube Goldberg machine. I hope that doesn’t happen with “Blurred Lines,” because it’s the concept of musical influence that would suffer.
Now after several delays, the trial begins today! While I was hoping to make it, I’ll have to watch from afar.
