Category talk:European Space Agency images

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These images are non free and the foundation has made it pretty clear in recent anouncements that it wants non free images cleaned out.Geni 17:16, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure that a place can be found for some of them. Many ESA-related pages have nothing else to illustrate them, and since much of the spacecraft are already in space a free alternative would be very hard to produce, wouldn't it? The current policy means that Wikipedia users will never see close-up images of the comet the Rosetta spacecraft is flying to, or indeed, images from any of these otherwise interesting missions, when fair-use is obviously being followed by the majority of them. For instance, a down-sized version of this [1] could be put on the Rosetta page, to illustrate that a flyby of Mars did occur; with no fear of legal retribution from ESA (which I believe is unlikely anyway). Other thoughts? --Planetary 19:29, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I concur. However, ESA is also working in partnership with NASA, which states that their images are in public domain (since they're a Government agency) and therefore also can't be copyrighted. Since the hardware is being shared between the two, wouldn't the images be likewise under the Fair Use law? -- WSpaceport 00:19, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not a lawyer, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt. My understanding is that although fair use certainly applies for some images, like illustrations of spacecraft in space (free alternatives would be very hard to get!), it's not for them all, and ESA's partnership with NASA is only limited, so that although Hubble images are fine here, stuff from entirely European (or Japanese) spacecraft is subject to copyright law, as far as I can tell. I must admit that I think that a space agency probably isn't really concerned with suing non-profit organizations like Wikimedia, so this "non-commercial or education use only" debate isn't really valid, in my opinion.--Planetary 05:30, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

NASA images are only in the public domain if the work is NASA's only - as soon as they work with someone else the work is no longer public domain - so that definitly excludes these ESA images. The ESA probably doesn't care much that their images are used here - the thing is that Wikipedia cares, it has principles, kinda refreshing :), sbandrews (t) 17:14, 27 March 2007 (UTC)