Hacker News Reader

Comment by nick238 | Hacker News Reader

Google Image search has an option under Tools (seems like you need to search first to get it to show up), then you can pick one of unfiltered, "Creative Commons licenses", or "Commercial & other licenses".

View on HN

Does it allow filtering Creative Commons version 4 only or all CC licenses jumbled?

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-...

There are a number of different CC-licenses which impose different restrictions on how a work can be used so filtering by just "Creative Commons licenses" is not very helpful. Openverse[1] provides filtering by specific CC licenses, and also for finding public domain images specifically. Disclosure: I am a maintainer for Openverse.

[1]: https://openverse.org

I just tested Kagi and DuckDuckGo, both can also filter image results on license type.

While that's useful, CC images and public domain image search results are pretty meaningfully different.

Which one of those is 'public domain'?

One is a license for all commercial use. Creative Commons is more restrictive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license.

It's not clear what 'commercial use' means.

Public domain gets assigned automatically when some time has passed or by the author releasing it into the public domain under the cc zero license. Unsplash started like that. There are potential issues like uncertainty about signed model release documents when people are the main part of the picture plus trademarks prominently appearing.

it’s complicated

Just realized I did not really answer the question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com