I was about to take some quick photos of household objects for a demo home inventory system today when it dawned on me to simply look for suitable ones online. Searching around I found one great site and one that is totally clueless as to what public domain means.
First the great site, PublicDomainArchive.com, an absolutely wonderful collection of images that are truly public domain.
Now the clueless site, PublicDomainPictures.net, I found one picture that I thought I might use but then I read this on the images page.
License: Public Domain. If you are going to redistribute this image online, a hyperlink to this particular page is mandatory.
The highlighted part is completely contradictory to the concept of public domain. The CC public domain license they link to disagrees with the highlighted text.
The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
When you waive all of your rights you can’t have a mandatory attribution provision, you can ask for a link and many people would freely give one but making it mandatory is right out. Because they want attribution in the form of a link they need to use one of the CC attribution licenses. Considering how clueless they are, and that their one image I was considering was not that good anyway, I’ll pass on ever using or recommending their site. People who are this clueless on copyright and public domain I’ve found are often trouble waiting to happen so I strongly recommend you stay well away from their site.
Again if you want fantastic unencumbered by licenses images, click this: public domain images.
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