Image licencing question

[RizzoTheRat]

Can anyone point me at a good primer on image licencing, ie what I can do with images obtained under different licencing agreements.

As far as I can tell most licencing systems are about how many times you can use the image, and if it's for commercial gain or not, so nice and simple if you're doing a print run of a load of posters or putting it on a website.

However I'm after a large number of images that will be analysed but never displayed or shown to anyone (training a neural net), and I have no idea how this is effected by licencing. Clearly I could just set up some sort of scraper searching google for copyright free images, but that limits my choice a lot. Shutterstock's pricing plans seem to be limited to 750 downloads per month, not looked at other sites yet but I'm hoping to need a lot more pictures than that.

Any thoughts?

[RobDickinson]

hmm quite an odd request!

Is this for a commercial project?

There are plenty of creative commons images ( via interwebs or flickr etc) you could use regardless.

I wouldnt be expecting to licence images for training a learning system like this.

[RizzoTheRat]

We're a commercial company being paid to do it as a research project so it must count as commercial.

Looking at the Wikipedia page for Creative Commons, it defines non-commercial as "Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes." Well I'm not planning to copy, distribute, or display them, though does downloading them mean I am copying them even if nobody else even sees it? The fact I'm being paid for it certainly seems against the spirit of a non-commercial licence though.

[davepoth]

RizzoTheRat said:

We're a commercial company being paid to do it as a research project so it must count as commercial.

It depends. There is a "fair use" clause whereby if (for example) you looked at the photograph in question and critiqued it in terms of artistic and technical merit then that would be OK, because the work was transformative - you were building upon the work with something new and of merit. If you are just using the photos to make it look pretty then it's not OK.

[RizzoTheRat]

Interesting. looking at the Wikipedia page for Fair Use, one classification is if it "advances knowledge", which this will, and it also mentioned copying a thumbnail for use in a search engine and digitising books for the purposes of data mining.

I hope what I'm doing should be covered under fair use in that case, but I think it might be worth keeping away from "not for commercial use" images as it does look like I'm skirting the boundaries of legal precedence.

[Craikeybaby]

It may be worth contacting one of the big stock agencies, such as Alamy, to get their take on it/what they would charge.

[GSalt]

I'd suggest engaging a specialist copyright lawyer for meaningful advice.

What you're doing doesn't sound like a standard commercial usage, so an off-the-shelf usage license is to unlikely give you the best value.