The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20080216230806/http://philip.greenspun.com:80/copyright/
Digital photo titled venice-beach-5

Copyright Notice

from Philip Greenspun
All the text and pictures on this Web server are copyright 1985-2005 Philip Greenspun. For your viewing pleasure, I have established a list of Internet heroes who have complied with the terms below and a list of weasels who haven't.

Here are the terms of my blanket license...

Printing of photos for personal use

If you want a copy of one of my pictures to stick on your fridge or use in a school project or cover a crack in your wall, then please feel free to print anything you like from my site. For the best quality reproduction, please see the high-res downloading instructions below. For the best quality you may wish to go to your local professional photo lab and have them make a print from the Kodak PhotoCD files on this server.

Non-commercial Web use of photos

If you have a personal home page or non-commercial Web service, please feel free to use my photographs with a hyperlinked credit on every page where one of my photos appears. Acceptable HTML is
photographs courtesy <a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/">Philip Greenspun</a>
That way people know who took the picture and also can find my on-line copyright statement. You do not need to pay for usage. Just build the best Web site you can and give it back to the community.

Commercial Web use of photos

If you would like to use my pictures on a commercial page, then please do the following:
  1. register the URL with me (sending email is fine)
  2. add the hyperlinked credit as above (on every page where a photo appears)
You do not need to pay for usage, either, though I reserve the right to deny usage on sites that I find to be truly poisonous.

If you would like to distinguish yourself from the get-rich-quick artists looking to make a fast buck off the Internet without contributing anything back to the community and you feel that my photography enhances your site, then please make a charitable donation to www.sarasanctuary.org, a no-kill animal shelter in Seguin, Texas.

Note: remember that most of the pictures of people on my pages are not model-released. Advertising usage of photos (e.g., brochures, catalogs, print ads) is very different from editorial usage of photos (e.g., newspaper and magazine articles, books). You cannot use pictures in advertising (e.g., an on-line product brochure or anything else that is selling) without getting a model release from any person whose image is recognizable in the photo. You might also have problems if an image contains a recognizable physical property, e.g., Disneyland. One of the reasons advertisers pay $1000+ for images from stock agencies is that those agencies have generally already gotten the relevant releases.

Use of photos and Web pages in print

If you're a non-profit organization and want to use one of my photos in a printed brochure or magazine, you can do so at no charge with a "Photo courtesy http://philip.greenspun.com" credit. For reproductions of any size you probably want to reproduce from the original Kodak PhotoCD, a 2000x3000 pixel scan (300 dpi at 7x10"). If you're looking at http://www.photo.net/photo/pcd2488/maple-trees-12, the PhotoCD may be obtained by adding ".pcd" to the URL, e.g., http://www.photo.net/photo/pcd2488/maple-trees-12.pcd. If you're looking at a particular resolution image, e.g., http://www.photo.net/photo/pcd2488/maple-trees-12.3.jpg, chop off the ".3.jpg" at the end and replace it with ".pcd". If you're the first person to want an image and therefore the file is not found please contact me and I'll upload the original from the CDs in my file cabinet. An increasing percentage of the images on this server are from digital cameras. If you're looking at http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/200208-nome-council-road/gold-dredge-1.half.jpg, for example, you can obtain the maximum resolution original camera file by removing the ".half" from the URL. In many cases I also have the RAW file produced by the camera and it is both higher in resolution and has better detail in shadows and highlights but cannot be processed without special tools.

If you're a musical group and want to use one of my photos for a CD cover, you can do so at no charge with a "Cover photo courtesy http://philip.greenspun.com" credit in the liner notes. If convenient, please mail a copy of the finished product to Philip Greenspun, 5 Irving Terrace, #3, Cambridge, MA 02138. Send me a check if it goes platinum :-)

If you are doing a story, book, or CD-ROM about the World Wide Web, please feel free to include a page or two of mine under the following conditions:

  1. the URL is legible in the capture or separately printed in a caption
  2. a small credit is printed reading "Photos courtesy http://philip.greenspun.com"
  3. send me email informing me of the usage

If you want to use a photo in a for-profit print project, e.g., magazine article, advertisement, book, brochure, etc., please contact me via email. It will help if you include the full URL of the image on my server, e.g., http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/200209-los-angeles/cathedral-underground-2.

Paintings/Drawings

Artists are welcome to use these photos as a basis for a drawing or painting in exchange for a credit. If an image of the artwork is displayed on the Web, credit should be a hyperlink to http://philip.greenspun.com with a note "Partially based on a photo from http://philip.greenspun.com". Otherwise the same note can be used in a printed description of the work.

Bounty

If you see one of my pictures in a magazine or a Web page and there is no credit, then it is almost surely unauthorized. If you are the first person to tell me about it, I'll send you a free print for your wall.

Text and Stories

Please feel free to redistribute via hardcopy or email for noncommercial purposes any of my writings, but please don't break up documents (except by chapter) and please attribute the source in such a way that someone can find the most up-to-date version on the Web.

Please do not ever copy any of my (text) content to a public Web server. Link to my pages instead. I guarantee not to break any of your links. The problem with you putting a page on your server is that the search engines will find it and send my readers to your server instead. Thus they will be deprived of my latest content and service innovations.

philg@mit.edu