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Comment by tommorris | Hacker News Reader

Perfectly legal to charge for public domain photos, just as it is legal to charge for software that's released under open source licenses, so long as you follow the terms of the license.

People are lazy and will pay money so they don't have to think about licensing. If you are a graphic designer working in an ad agency and you have a choice between "go online and download a PD work and not be sure" and "pay Getty $50 and if there's a copyright issue, you can tell your boss that you paid Getty", which do you do? Pop it on the corporate credit card is the easier option.

It's the same reason big companies were suspicious of open source for a long time. And some still are.

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It's (probably) legal to charge for public domain photos, but I don't believe it is to send cease-and-desist letters over the use of public works.

From the comments >The Adventure of Tom Sawyer is public domain. Getty is publishing then the book and attacking anybody who uses the name Tom Sawyer in anything. They got caught when they filed a DMCA complaint against Mark Twain for having the book on his personal website.

Is it legal to charge for public domain photos, if you mislead the person who is charged to believe that the photos are not public domain?

I guess this depends on local legislation, but in most jurisdictions, I think this would be called fraud.

It's legal to charge for public domain content. It's not legal to misrepresent your wares to the buyer (fraud, as you said). There is no duty to inform buyers that the thing you're selling is available for free somewhere else, but when you're going around and demanding royalties from people using something that's PD and claiming to have an exclusive right to licensing the image, it's a different ball game.

So yeah, just selling it on their website is probably fine, but extorting money out of people who have equal right to use the image is probably not.

Yea, this is an interesting effect. I wonder why there isn't an OpenSourceGetty company that charges a much lower fee for guaranteeing that the IP really is open source? They do the research leg work, and then you pay them $5 for a commitment to reimburse/defend you if you get sued.

I guess someone else could just try to free-ride off them by not doing the research, but honestly the legal commitment ("bonded open source") would be the valuable and expensive part.

Not legal to trawl the internet and find people using that photo, and make legal demands of licensing fees.

That's fraud and misrepresentation.

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