About, Disclaimer, and a Public Domain Manifesto
Hi, this is Swivelchair. I work in the biopharma area. Not a scientist, not a journalist, mostly in the 
business aspects. I have a science and business background, and have been involved in a variety of biotechnology-related ventures.
My other blog is “Neurological Correlates – A Neuroscience Tabloid of Dysfunctional Behavior ” There is a nascent companion video site, Psychoanalyst.tv, too.
One of my hobbies is curating out-of-copyright scientific illustration, now that there are so many digital image databases on the web.
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Disclaimer and waiver *sigh*: Vintage Printable can’t guarantee anything in life. If anyone wants an image removed, please send e mail. Also *sigh* no representations or warranties about anything to anyone, including that the images actually are public domain or otherwise have no restrictions on use, or warranties of merchantability or any other kind of warranty. Each user is fully responsible for their own use of these images and recognizes Vintage Printable is not responsible in any way for anything. Users understand that we believe the images are free to use, and are not carriers of some awful computer bug or some other terror that will crash the internets *Sigh*. Of course we can’t guarantee anything, or give any kind of legal, copyright or advice about your life in general, so if you are at all concerned, find your trusted adviser and ask them. Images we collect from public sources are tagged with meta information or other information for description, indexing and being picked up by the search engines. We may clean them up a little, and we certainly don’t claim any kind of rights in that at all.
If any one wants any image removed please send me an e mail with your reasons, and more than likely the image will be removed. Nothing here is to be considered a legal opinion, etc. You all know the drill. If you are going to sink big time money, or make life-altering decisions based on the images in this site or any other site, one word: don’t.
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Our position statement:
Public domain images by definition have no copyright restriction on use in the U.S.
Nevertheless, as with any new technology that eliminates the middle man, there are vested interests in the old way of making money. There are some entities that would like to take really old, out of copyright two- dimensional works, take a photo (albeit, a professional photo), and then claim: “Gotcha. New copyright, pay me. ”
Our own view is that this is wrong: the whole point of copyright law is that it only lasts for a period of time, not forever. If copyright lasted forever, then there would be no dissemination of new ideas, because everyone would be frozen afraid to be sued — among a zillion other reasons. Plus copyright rewards creativity — not work. Mere duplication shouldn’t count as creativity. If copyright rewarded the amount of work, then a high-throughput scanner could be an author. Copyright rewards the tangible embodiment of creativity — even if you only wake up and do that creative thing in a fog for one second and then fall asleep or watch cute kitten videos all day long, as some at château Swivelchair are wont to do. You can be brilliantly creative and hardly work at all. This is what many people strive for and copyright protects that.
Think: would DaVinci be thrilled with the British libraries and other places that claim: “Gotcha! All the world has enjoyed your work for millenia, but now that we paid to hire a really good photographer who knows how to light it to take a really good photo and so we get to own the rights again! ”
This is wrong on so many levels.
Institutions do have an argument: “We spent good money digitizing these — like a zillion dollars! Now we should control who gets to print these out or copy these digitally!”
Our answer: If taxpayer money paid for (a) the original acquisition of the object; (b) the scanning/photography, as well as museum overhead, then shouldn’t the otherwise public domain scan belong to the public?
Here’s another argument: It’s private funds, from rich people.
Our Answer: Then give back any tax deductions you take. If you claim that private money gives you the right to make profit on the things you buy with it then to me that indicates you are not an non-profit institution. Just pay the back taxes and we’ll call it square. More than that, it’s usually private commingled with taxpayer money.
Sorry readers and viewers, scrapbookers and rock and rollers, Southerners and New Yorkers and Australians and Canadians – now that there seems to be some scrapes with Wikimedia, I wanted to post this manifesto. I feel the same way about scientific research done with public money that is then published behind a paywall. If I (representing taxpayers generally) paid for the research, I shouldn’t have to pay to see the results.
Please see (for example):
Wikimedia Commons:Reuse of PD-Art photographs
Archives or Assets? by Peter B. Hirtle, Cornell University, 58th president of the Society of American Archivists, (N.B.:President Peter B. Hirtle presented an abbreviated version of this address at the opening plenary session of the 67th annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Los Angeles on Aug. 21, 2003.)
User:Dcoetzee/NPG Legal Threat
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Update as to other legislation that we see as being bad for us and bloggers as a whole:
“Stop Online Piracy Act”: See our post, No to SOPA. Our main gripe is that the legislation is basically a blog gag order — the law would permit government shut-down of sites before any determination that there is copyright infringement (or no fair use). We think this would be strictly a First Amendment no-no. As said in the noted Near v. Minnesota (upholding the rights of tabloid publishers to publish politician scandals and take their lumps if it was libelous),the main purpose of the First Amendment freedom of the press is to guarantee no prior restraint on publication.You get to publish first, and if you screw up and libel someone or infringe a copyright, you pay the price later. The SOPA concept of a pre-emptive gag order is exactly opposite of what the First Amendment is all about, stemming from Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence (from the Near v. Minnesota opinion, Hughs, J.):
The question is whether a statute authorizing such proceedings in restraint of publication is consistent with the conception of the liberty of the press as historically conceived and guaranteed. In determining the extent of the constitutional protection, it has been generally, if not universally, considered that it is the chief purpose of the guaranty to prevent previous restraints upon publication. The struggle in England, directed against the legislative power of the licenser, resulted in renunciation of the censorship of the press. The liberty deemed to be established was thus described by Blackstone: “The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press; but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.”
OK, we’re not a Pentagon Papers publisher or Hustler Magazine,. But we strongly oppose any prior restraint of anything we do. In general. Be that as it may . . . this site is licensed with a creative commons non-commercial attribution license.
Although of course we don’t claim any rights in the individual works – public domain works can be copied freely. But, please understand that you do not have permission to wholesale copy major portions of this site, including organized collections of works. (We’re mostly talking about site scrapers and the like.) For example, works that were part of a single book now out of copyright are free to be copied, but from time to time we have selected those images and added to additional images for aesthetic and organizational purposes. If you are going to copy works in bulk this way, please know that that copying is licensed under a non-commercial attribution license — thanks much. We want to remain recognizable in our organization, our overall selection of images, and the way we use that little Tapir in our logo.
From CreativeCommons.org:
Vintage Printable by Vintage Printable is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at VintagePrintable.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://vintageprintable.com/wordpress.
More to come, thanks for stopping by — we hope this is useful and entertaining –
Swivelchair
My e mail:
swivelchairmedia@gmail.com
Click to find us on Twitter
Comments
Just want to say thank you for all that you do. If you need help, I’m here to volunteer.
Also, I was looking at some of your stuff on Scribd.com and they were requiring at least a one day subscription of $5 to download.
Now, I also have documents on Scribd and they’re supposed to be free to anybody who wants them so when I saw that your downloads were requiring a payment I checked the settings on mine and fixed it so that they’re back to free.
Don’t know if it’s intentional, but thought I’d give you the heads up.
Again, if you need any help I’m happy to assist. Any back end stuff, tagging, sorting. Whatever. Just ask.
ABOUT YOUR GALLERIES: I can’t get the pictures to hold still long enough to see anything! I try to click on an interesting picture and the whole thing leaps away from the mouse.
While it may be graphically “exciting” and a programming tour de force … as a user interface is sucks. Really sucks.
Thank you for setting up such a useful, fun, and addictive site. I visit often, and I’m almost always greeted by an apology on your main website regarding functionality, servers, etc.
I’m sure it’s difficult to balance functionality/ quality/ quantity. Nevertheless, you do an excellent job. I understand the sentiment, but as you’re site is free AND awesome, why apologize? It’s clear that you do your best to update often and rectify glitches.
Thanks again.
Best wishes,
Madison
Thank you for providing this to us designers and crafters, I think this is super! Nevermind all the incredibly lazy people who are criticizing the functionality.
D – thank you for the kind words.
I can’t get the images to open. Any suggestions? I’m using Google Chrome as my browser.
I love your site for inspiration and ideas. I want to design a t-shirt and I love a flower image on your site. I’d love to put it with some other art images – some my own. My question is, If the copyright no longer exists for the flower image from your site, am I allowed to use part of the flower image along with other images to create a t-shirt that could be sold?
Thanks in advance for your feedback,
Geneveive
Absolutely love your rant and agree whole-heartedly.
Thank you for such an eclectic source of images!
Thank you!!! Great resource. Fantastic collection. Keep up the good work.
The images are superb for reference purposes for my job as a freelance designer but the images won’t load, such a shame, i can’t see them!. As someone mentioned earlier on here…. your website isn’t powerful enough for most people’s basic home pc’s. But please don’t reduce the quality (size) of the images!
I want to thank you for the service you provide and applaud you for being as open as you are about the copyright status of the images you provide. I get frustrated when I see websites trying to claim copyrights that they simply don’t own just because they scanned an image. We need ethical people like yourselves more than ever. Thank you again.
Thank you for this wonderful resource. I absolutely agree with your stand on copyright and public domain…If our governing bodies were only collage artists (in any medium), then the laws would make more sense! * sigh *