FAQs

What is the film about?

It’s about images: about who owns them, and who controls them. It focuses in particular on a quirk by which historical images that are no longer subject to copyright (in other words, that are legally in the public domain) and so should be freely available to the public, are mostly not. The film explores why this is the case, and – in a final twist – makes a small but direct intervention in the image economy.

Why is this a problem?

All creative works, even children’s first doodles, are automatically copyrighted as soon as they’re made. Seventy years after their creator dies, the copyright lapses and they legally enter the ‘public domain’. For example, on January 1st 2022, just over 70 years after Virginia Woolf died, her entire works entered the public domain. So now anyone can freely copy them, share them, make school plays or Hollywood movies from them.

However, for images, the principle of the public domain doesn’t quite work. When a book becomes public domain, you can get hold of the text from a library or bookshop. But there’s no mechanism which ensures that when images enter the public domain, they actually become publicly accessible. Often, if they were previously behind an archive’s paywall, they just stay behind the paywall. As a result, every year, ever more images enter the public domain, but relatively fewer become publicly accessible. This is already a big problem; as the visual public domain is eroded ever further, it will become an ever greater problem in the future.

What is the solution?

A wide-ranging solution could take the form of an internationally-agreed law that requires all archives to make all digitised public domain images in their collections freely available to the public. This is unlikely ever to happen.

A more achievable step forward would be for image archives to commit to making at least some of their public domain images freely accessible. Every New Year, for example, they could release extra clips for free use online. In the case of publicly funded archives, governments could make increased accessibility a part of their funding requirements. There are other possible solutions too, but to find them, the problem itself needs to be widely acknowledged first. Currently it is not.

But don’t archives have to cover their costs?

Of course: it costs money to digitise, upconvert, and store images. Commercial image banks like Getty Images might also argue that by licensing public domain images, they also protect their clients from legal liability (in case it turns out the images aren’t actually public domain), so they allow clients to use historical images with peace of mind.

This is all true, but historical images now typically make up a very small proportion of commercial archives’ profits, so already-digitised public domain images could be made freely available without serious financial implications. More generally, any archive that holds public domain images in its collection does not own those images – it is merely a custodian of them. And, just as with historic buildings or ancient treasures, having custody of historically significant images entails a social responsibility.

Have you had any response from Getty Images?

Not yet, but I would welcome any potentially constructive discourse about how to make public domain images more accessible.

How much did you pay for the public domain clips?

Roughly $8,000 in total, from various sources including personal funds, a grant, and my producer’s production company. When I paid for the clips myself, I licensed them for web only. When the film started screening at festivals, my producer felt that we should pay the higher ‘documentary’ rate to be safe. So we relicensed a number of clips even though we already had the files. It’s ironic that the only entity that has made any significant money from this film is Getty Images.

Couldn’t you just share your purchased clips without embedding them in the film?

It depends on the jurisdiction. In the UK, copyright law trumps contract, so if a clip is public domain you can use it however you like regardless of any license that you may have signed. But in the USA, for example, it’s the other way around. So Getty could still seek damages from someone for sharing public domain clips, if they did so counter to their license agreement. Viewers of the film, however, have not signed any license, and so can do whatever they like with the clips - for example, upload them to the Internet Archive.

Is the project on-going?

Yes. I’m currently developing the film into a feature documentary about visual capitalism, provisionally entitled Empires of Images. The next phase of the project will focus on AI image generation, inspired by the current legal case by Getty Images against Stability AI, maker of the AI image generator Stable Diffusion.