Stan Shebs a écrit :

But those external contractors aren't on the satellite either - I suppose there is an interesting legal question as to ownership of the raw bits coming from an onboard camera, vs the final processed image. My

There's also a question of the ownership of the raw bits from some particularly complex instruments. The researcher or institute who made the instrument may have rights.

kind of a special license at some point. But the ESA really does risk their legacy vanishing in the same way that much copyrighted material from the 20th century is vanishing - would European taxpayers be OK with that if they knew it was going on?

European taxpayers have more urgent issues, like crime, unemployment and the like. Expect nothing grassroot.

one or another agenda, so with an ESA limitation on political propaganda, satellite-produced maps of ocean temperature and such would have to come from NASA - and in these partisan days, would you want to trust them as a sole source?

It's not so much political propaganda that they don't want, but political *advertisements*. Things like using images of Ariane rockets during the campaign for the proposed European constitution.

This is very different from using photos in a biased article. The difference is that in the article, at least they try to base themselves on the fact, and that with the advertisement they want to use the *image*.

ESA and CNES simply don't want their image associated with partisan politics, or with any brand name, because taxpayer-funded institutions cannot appear to advertise in favor of brand names nor, worse, in a partisan way in politics.

(We may have got an interesting case of false cognate here - in French, "propagande électorale" is the legal term for the leaflets and other documents that are officially sent by all parties before elections.)

I'm a little skeptical of the interim agreement idea, because that's exactly how we got so infested with bogus fair use images.

The problem, I think, is that fair use is very vaguely defined and that use of fair use images doesn't require the agreement of the publishers of the image, but only the legally creative mind of an uploader.

What I suggest is drafting a license, CC-like, with very specific conditions. We would accept such kinds of licenses only in cases where there's a rationale for it (by mail to OTRS). This should prevent spurious use.

Regards, -- DM