Dear Mr. Bell,

During image collection for the well known free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) I came across some Venus ground images from soviet Venera space probes on your website located at:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/photogallery-venus.html

As there is no further copyright notice it seems to me that I can assume according to NASA's website copyright policies that I can consider all images that have no special copyright byline within the public domain.

However as these are clearly soviet images I want to make sure that it is not a mistake by you.

To my knowledge the copyright matter with soviet images is as follows:

All works published in the Soviet Union before May 27, 1973 were not protected by International Copyright Conventions and are thus in the public domain as the Sovjet Union joined the International Copyright Conventions at that date. Additionally the Sovjet Union declared that this convention does not apply restrospective for works published in the Sovjet Union previous to that date.

However most of the Venera images on your website are dated some years after 1973 so this special exception for soviet works does not apply in these cases.

So now there are two possible assumptions coming into my mind if the images are really with the public domain:

* Works of soviet government agencies are as like as US-Gov works within the public domain (currently I have no information available that would support this assumption).

* The Venera radio signals were recieved independently from NASA radio telescopes and independently decoded and prepared by NASA, so that these data were now "NASA data".

So my question is if I can safely consider these soviet images as public domain.

Your help in enlighting this matter would very much appreciated within the Wikipedia Community (and we would act Wikipedia wide according to what you say).

Many thanks in advance,

Daniel Arnold - Wikipedia