There are lots of sites that provide images that somebody has claimed are public domain. But for significant use, you what you really need is provenance documentation.
These folks seem to be more up-front about the issue than many sites I’ve seen:
> On each image page we communicate to the best of our knowledge the rights status of both the underlying work and the digital copy of this work. We provide this information based on a basic knowledge of copyright law and what is communicated by the source institution — it is strictly meant as a guideline and it should not be taken as legal advice. We admit no responsibility for any untoward consequences that may arise through reuse of material featured on our site. If you are requiring certainty as to usage allowed for an image, then you are encouraged to check with the source institution and make your own investigations.
Standard Ebooks has a database of public domain oil paintings for use as book covers. SE is strict about copyright clearance and requires either scans of a copyright‐expired publication containing the painting, or an explicit statement from a reputable museum that the work is CC0. Here’s an entry I contributed:
On the other hand they do allow search by century and very little from the 19th (and none earlier) century is still in copyright anywhere.
There is a possible problem with countries where a photographer can have copyright over their photograph of an earlier work. Again, there is not global standard.
Since the national security apparatus have the means to remove, edit or implant what they wish - who's job is this now, and what is it like so far? Have they put a cage of rats on your head and made you denounce your lover? How is Victory Gin?
Does anyone know how easily you can do "copyright clearance" for these supposedly public domain images?
For example, the page for the first image I clicked on said:
Date
1833
Underlying Rights
Public Domain Worldwide
Digital Rights
No Additional Rights
* Source states “no known restrictions”
* We offer this info as guidance only
If, for example, you design the cover of a self-published book around such an image, is Amazon KDP going to reject it, because they don't accept that screenshot as sufficient proof of rights?
I know this is a joke, but just as a note, in some european countries, the person who digitized the artwork may have a copyright. It varries a bit by country.
Unfortunately, the infinite scroll page doesn't work very well... but this one scrolls normal and doesn't open random pages, and it seems to be the same stream of picutures: https://pdimagearchive.org/galleries/all/random/desc
Don't websites like these popup every year, almost same images, different design? You never actually know if you can really use those images for free actually..
This is great, came across an image of a Labyrinth, which led me to a 1920s book about Labyrinths. I'm currently making a game level with hedge mazes. Thanks.
I don't know if I'll ever use this but that "Infinite View" is a lot of fun, I just lost 20 minutes before snapping myself out of a trance. Some really cool pictures in there.
Delulu take but lets say it goes to court, how would they be able to reproduce the entire process that was used to generate the image aka the training, hardware in the tens of millions, reverse engineering and finding their own training data enough to exactly match the output from the frontier models. How would you order them to reveal their proprietary and protected IP so you can then recreate the exact same model , produce the exact same pixel by pixel accurate image, over and over repeatedly enough to satisfy staticians and jury? How would you then rely on this carbon copy of the frontier model to argue the model isn't learning that it's not actually finding the style and applying it to the output, exactly like some art student flipping through other artists work to reproduce it by learning their style
The entire US economy wouldn't be banking on AI if they were just going to let some patreon furry pornographer win a landmark case against the top 5 biggest capitalized company don't you think?
Adding this to the list for one of my side projects[0].
[0] https://flaneur.ink
Edit: I saw the small link to examples :)
These folks seem to be more up-front about the issue than many sites I’ve seen:
https://pdimagearchive.org/reusing-images/
> On each image page we communicate to the best of our knowledge the rights status of both the underlying work and the digital copy of this work. We provide this information based on a basic knowledge of copyright law and what is communicated by the source institution — it is strictly meant as a guideline and it should not be taken as legal advice. We admit no responsibility for any untoward consequences that may arise through reuse of material featured on our site. If you are requiring certainty as to usage allowed for an image, then you are encouraged to check with the source institution and make your own investigations.
https://standardebooks.org/artworks/arthur-i-keller/calvin-c...
On the other hand they do allow search by century and very little from the 19th (and none earlier) century is still in copyright anywhere.
There is a possible problem with countries where a photographer can have copyright over their photograph of an earlier work. Again, there is not global standard.
To be specific, Germany is one of the few countries where this applies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
It's an absolutely stupid idea IMO.
For example, the page for the first image I clicked on said:
with a link to: https://pdimagearchive.org/reusing-images/If, for example, you design the cover of a self-published book around such an image, is Amazon KDP going to reject it, because they don't accept that screenshot as sufficient proof of rights?
The entire US economy wouldn't be banking on AI if they were just going to let some patreon furry pornographer win a landmark case against the top 5 biggest capitalized company don't you think?
I'll let you keep dreaming if it makes you happy.