Public Work: a search engine for public domain images
public.work
public.work
Really like it!
The search engine from OP seems a little bit off. I tried some technical search terms and it didn't really produce anything. Maybe that's just not what it's for.
When I see an article with an ugly AI-generated cartoon at the top, I can't help but think we could have articles with cool random artwork by real people instead if it was as easy to find freely licensed artwork by living artists as it is to just generate something with AI. It feels like there's a huge hole there that doesn't exist in photography (thanks to Flickr), doesn't exist in video (Youtube lets you tag your videos as CC), doesn't exist in audio (many years ago Newgrounds created an entire audio section just for CC music that could be used in flash games/animation by other users), but somehow exists in illustration.
Even in OpenVerse, if I search for "illustration," most results will be historic. I realize that in most cases it doesn't make a difference, but I really wish I could have a URL to link to. I wish I could say "here's this picture, and here's a link to this guy's portfolio, who put this on the internet and let me use it."
Is there some method I'm not aware of or is this just how it is?
Based on a quick look over the DeviantArt API documentation, it doesn't look like there's a way to get rights statements/licence information for a particular work: https://www.deviantart.com/developers/http/v1/20240701/objec...
As far as I can tell, they don't have any way to programmatically browse their catalogue at all, meaning we couldn't easily include it in Openverse with our current capabilities. However, they don't disallow crawling or search indexing, so if we are eventually able to reimplement that capability (e.g., using CommonCrawl data, if DA is there), it might be possible to search for openly licensed works on DeviantArt in Openverse.
I do wonder why DeviantArt doesn't make this possible themselves though, and whether that's an intentional decision since their redesign. As a stop-gap, you can use "site:deviantart.com" on Google images and enable their CC license filter. As mentioned elsewhere, the lack of granularity in Google's license filter leaves much to be desired.
I would pay a license fee and so would a lot of smaller sites if you had insurance and indemnification if they got sued.
However much I dislike Unsplash, and that's quite a bit, I do think there's a interesting benefit to their paid offer where if you use an unsplash image and it turns out that actually copyrighted (e.g. someone who is not the photographer who uploads the image and then the photographer sues you for using the image), Getty will defend you / pay your legal fees.
Right now I'm very particular about using things labeled out of copyright or uncopyrighted. Even things that are in the Flickr Commons or on NASA's site can be suspect.
For instance I just ran across a company logo uploaded by the San Diego aviation museum that's listed as out of copyright in Flickr Commons, but I strongly suspect it's still copyrighted. On NASA's site, I've seen images attributed to SpaceX and don't trust them at all not to sue.
Given that the penalty for being wrong on copyright can be insanely high even if you have the best intentions, I would really like a source that I could trust and would pay to be indemnified.
I was making some photo editing tutorials and I ran into a similar problem. I needed a photo of a person. Turns out photos of people have their own additional set of legal problems (right to one's own image). This made me very worried because surely all these photographers who are marking their photos as CC have the consent of the models, right? Otherwise nobody would be able to use the CC photos. What would be the point of a photo being CC if it was illegal to copy it anyway? I think some website had a license that said I couldn't portray the person in the photo in bad light, or something of sort, which was particularly problematic for me since I was looking for a photo of someone sufficiently ugly to make a tutorial about skin retouching.
If a photo is used on Wikipedia with the licence you need, there is a solid chance the vetting process was done thoroughly enough. For photos of a person this would the first place to look for me.
No, they won't. They will only give you up to $10k per image and it only applies to images specifically marked as Unsplash+, not all Unsplash images.
And any kind of legal costs incurred prior to contacting them will also not be covered.
it’s complicated
Just realized I did not really answer the question.
Mess up attribution and in pre-v4 CC license it reverts back to All Rights Reserved.
This is the business model for some folks. 500 - 5000usd demand per infringement is a nasty surprise.
Here's one such case and company. https://petapixel.com/2022/06/01/copyright-trolls-are-suing-...
"angry man site:gutenberg.org"
or
"angry man site:oldbookillustrations.com"
in Brave Search.
It works pretty reliably, but I've been meaning to make a semantic search, because I often have to mess around with the keywords to get results for some more abstract ideas.
Feedback for this site:
- FYI when a search result returns few results, the images repeat in the infini-scroll. This makes it marginally more difficult to evaluate each image, especially not knowing the exact number of hits w/o counting the number of images that haven't repeated.
- I may be wrong but it feels like there are a lot fewer images here than there can be.
- As other have pointed out, while attribution isn't leagally required for PD images, it's extremely important for many potential users as it allows them to validate the license claim you are making.
Who created the image? When? Where? How can I find more from the same book, or by the same artist?
Cultural amnesia is one thing, but annihilating the credits and context deliberately is very bad indeed.
Pinterest does this evil trick, and Cosmos bills itself as 'Pinterest for creatives' = pure internet cancer.
I searched for a known Wikipedia photo I had upl myself (“urinal”) but it didn’t show up on your search engine.
Infinite scrolling looks cool but also means you can’t easily get back to any given result.
I agree that is very hard to go back to a result, and also impossible to share a link to a specific result because the URL does not update. But as long as you are in a continuous session, the works you visit are added to a dock in the bottom-centre area of the page where you can go back to a result you've previously seen.
[1]: https://public.work/cacti%20iconography [2]: https://openverse.org/search?q=Charles+Lemaire
Basically, I want what you have on Openverse when I tap the information icon.