[Fsuk-manchester] MorgueFile

[Pete Morris]

Not directly about software, but a “free” query nonetheless.

 

Someone has directed me to morguefile.com and asked if they can really use all the images on it for any purpose. I have to confess I’ve not come across this site before, which surprises me as I’ve been involved in web and media and “free” culture for a good few years now. There are a number of things which don’t really square with me, so I’d be interested in any feelings anyone has:

 

1) It doesn’t seem to be affiliate to Creative Commons or a similar well-known free licensing model. Instead, they have their own “morgue” license, which seems to be a reworking that removes the need for attribution whilst preventing non-derivative commercial use. This seems to me to be a somewhat counter-intuitive model, almost the opposite of most CC licenses. It feels to me like a “don’t ask, don’t tell” license, where you can also use derivative works as a loophole to bypass copyright.

2) They have an enormous quantity of free high quality images in their bank, with no obvious indication of how they got them or (more importantly) how they can guarantee that there aren’t taken from copyrighted sources, far more than I would expect to have found. For example, using the word “flower” on other free/CC search sites, I’d expect to get around say 100 image matches, mostly poor quality, whereas this returned over 19,000 high quality ones.

3) Their Wikipedia page is a stub with very little history to it, which seems to contradict the supposed popularity of the site (in terms of measurement of images donated)

 

Does anyone have any opinions on this site, or know of any gossip as to whether it is legit or not. My fear is that it is just a front-end veneer for an pirate image bank, trying to masquerade as a “something to do with cool open source stuff”.

 

Apologies for my cynicism, but you can’t be too careful these days.

 

Pete