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From: | Pete Morris |
Subject: | [Fsuk-manchester] MorgueFile |
Date: | Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:08:39 +0100 |
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 |
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