Re: Reprint Sales (somewhat off-topic and off-thread)

[Dan Culbertson <danculb@concentric.net>]

> Last time I looked (a good while back) most stock images can not be resold.
> They can just be used in house or for stuff you produce like ads for your
> company.

I think you are right for commercial stock images.  However there is one
great source of "stock" images that can be sold - that is *some* of the
images available on the internet from government agencies.  Many are fairly
high resolution and quite usefull.  NASA and DOD are particularly rich
sources of images.  However one should always check for any site copyright
notices since some government agencies are now selling the partial rights to
their images to distribution companies and have links to those companies on
their web pages.  For example the "Dreamtime"  company that NASA has
partnered with to help with image distribution near as I can tell retains
some rights to the images they scan (at their expense) from NASA historical
files or from cameras they intend to mount (again at their expense) on NASA
space vehicles.  Reselling images that have been scanned or made by a
company under contract to a government agency may be a violation of the
license the agency has granted to the company.  While federal agencies may
not directly assert copyright, federal agency contractors and commercial
partners retain that option.  Satellite images are another case in point -
the data rights have often been licensed to the partner companies,
especially when the image is the primary product of the satellite.  But
there is still a *lot* of free re-sellable imagery on line from the federal
agencies - most do request that the image source be credited (ie "image
compliments of USAF," etc.).  I've read that a few folks have made a career
out of selling federal agency imagery (printed at high resolution on Epson
printers) to small periodicals.  The fee is for the research and the
printing of course, not the photography which is provided free by the feds.
But a fifty to a hundred bucks a print for non-original work could go a long
way toward paying off a cheap Epson printer! And the image search itself is
interesting.

A couple of excellent sites to mine for images -- KSC's Publisher's Photo
Corner archive at http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/captions/hotpics.htm
(be careful of the Hubble links, I think some of those images may be owned
by the partner operating the satellite) and the NASA Image eXchange at
http://nix.nasa.gov/.  Read the NIX copyright notice - that is a good set of
rules to follow for the free images from all the federal agencies.  Be
especially careful what you do with images of recognizable people!

Dan Culbertson

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