I could have gotten many of them for free at Project Gutenberg, but it was so much easier just deal with Amazon. I just recently paid $1.99 for 8 public domain Alexandre Dumas novels digitized for my Kindle. And there’s certainly no rule against charging consumers for access to public domain goods. Although it’s hard to see why its efforts are worth $120, we don’t have a general legal doctrine that prevents sellers from over charging. It claims to be making photos easier to find, and it will, apparently, promise to defend you if you are sued for using an image you obtain from Getty. Now, I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s immoral for Getty to charge so much, but is it illegal? Well, Getty does not claim to own the copyright in the public domain photos it sells, so that makes fraud harder to argue, although it nowhere reveals that its goods can be obtained for free elsewhere. For example, you can download a nice unprotected picture of author Rudyard Kipling on the Wikimedia Commons for free and do whatever you want with it, or you can go to the Getty web site and fork over $120 per year for using exactly the same picture. The story resonated with me because I had discovered in unrelated research that Getty was routinely charging consumers $120 dollars a year for web site use of public domain photos. As it turns out, Getty charges consumers for the use of these photographs Highsmith has dedicated for free public use and also charges consumers for the use of thousands more photos in the public domain due to the expiration of the copyright term of protection, the failure of the owner to renew a copyright, or due to the photo’s status as a government work (which are unprotected as a matter of statute). ![]() ![]() Understandably angry over being asked to pay for using a photograph that she herself had taken, Highsmith did a little investigating and discovered that the photo was one of thousands she took and allowed the public to use for free. One problem: Highsmith herself had taken the photograph. The suit stems from a letter sent to Highsmith demanding that she pay for the use of a particular photograph uploaded to her personal web site. You may have recently heard of an interesting lawsuit filed by photographer Carol Highsmith who has sued Getty Images for $1 billion in damages.
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