Episode: 3260
Title: HPR3260: Free, Public Domain and Creative Commons Assets
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3260/hpr3260.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:48:43

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3264 Friday 29th of January 2021, today's show is entitled
Free, Public Domain, and Creative Common Massage and is part of the series Gimp, it is
the 210th show of Ahuka, and is about 21 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summer is, using images and fonts that are not restricted.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our Gimp series.
This is going to look a little bit like a digression, but let me explain.
We're at the point now where I think I need to start developing exercises and examples of things to illustrate the stuff we're talking about.
It's an interesting problem when you're using basically a sound medium to talk about visual technology.
But in any case, I do want to start doing some examples of these things, but that raises another issue, and that issue is about copyright.
Because anytime you do something for public display, for commercial purposes, which covers a lot when you think about it, you could be subject to copyright implications.
Now, there are ways to protect yourself, and the best is to be very careful about what kinds of things you use.
And so what I want to do is I want to talk about a couple of things that are very, very frequently used in creating images in Gimp.
And that is images that you have downloaded from somewhere or fonts.
So I want to talk about both of them.
If you don't want to get any copyright infringement problems, I don't.
I'm doing these tutorials as a free public service, but I am putting them out on the web, et cetera.
So I want to be careful.
Fortunately, there are options.
There are some things that are public domain, meaning that they can be used in any way you like without restriction.
You don't have to pay any license fee or royalty.
Just use them in any way you like.
The other option is something called Creative Commons.
Link in the show notes, which is a different in that it is an explicit license, but possibly one that you can work with.
I like to think of Creative Commons as the counterpart to free software licensed under the GPL.
Both are explicitly relying on copyright law to preserve certain rights and freedoms and prevent exploitation.
I like both. I'm a fan of the GPL.
I think there's a place for public domain, as well as Creative Commons.
So as to which you use, it might depend on the circumstances.
Are you creating something that will be publicly exhibited or sold, for instance?
Then you need to pay attention to the licensing.
My wife is a graphic designer, as a matter of fact, she owns her own business.
And she regularly purchases licenses to stock photos that she uses for the websites and print materials of her clients.
For her, it's just another business expense.
She either passes that along to the customer directly or builds it into the fee that she charges.
And I know about this because I do all the bookkeeping.
Now, what I do on my website, on the other hand, is something I can't build to anyone.
You know, I'm just some guy, basically.
But it is public, by definition, if it's on the web, it's public.
So I could potentially face problems if I use copyrighted images that I did not have an appropriate license for.
Public domain things can be used freely without worrying.
Creative Commons, on the other hand, might mean that I need to be careful.
Now, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
In fact, all of my content is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution share-like license.
Which, by the way, is also the default for hacker public radio.
So almost everything, I don't, I think there may be a few exceptions.
But almost everything you hear on this channel is Creative Commons attribution share-like.
That's the default.
This means you could take this content and use it freely provided that, number one, you give credit to the author.
So I've had people using, I remember getting messages from people about some of the tutorial series that I've done in the past.
And I'd get a letter from a college professor saying, hey, I'm using this in my class.
And it's like, great. I'm glad you are.
But if you want to take that and put it into a book that you write or some other kind of material that you create, you just have to say, hey, I got this from Kevin O'Brien.
You can't just take it and act like it's your own.
So that's what the attribution part is.
The share-like means that you allow anyone else to use any derivative work that you've created with this stuff, just as freely as I have let you use it.
Now, to me, this is entirely reasonable.
I've licensed slide show presentations this way on slide share.
And that was after making these presentations at conferences that generally had similar licenses.
With audio programs and hacker public radio, I've done videos on YouTube.
I have articles that I've published in full circle magazine.
And this is all creative comments, attribution share-like.
If you take a look at any of my websites, you will see on the bottom of every page.
There is a little designation that says it is covered under the abbreviation cc-by-sa.
It means creative comments, attribution share-like.
Now, what you need to keep in mind is that according to copyright law in most places, any created work is under copyright the moment it's published.
You do not need to have a copyright notice.
So if there is no copyright notice on a creative created work, you can assume it is the property of the creator and that all rights are reserved.
Therefore, to avoid legal problems, pay attention to licensing.
If there's not an explicit written notice giving you the right to use something, you cannot use it.
So let's take a look at some things about images first.
Now, there are places that make images available for free unrestricted use by anyone, which is what we mean by public domain.
But legally, public domain tends to mean works that have gotten so old that they are no longer covered by copyright.
And even that, you have to be careful.
I was, for a number of years, involved in a group that performed Renaissance choral music, madrigals and similar things.
I don't know, you know, we're talking 16th, 17th century, clearly that has to be out of copyright.
Well, the original music probably is, but if you're reading it from a book that was edited and published five years ago by Oxford University, as we were, guess what?
They have a copyright on that edition and you're using it and you are subject to all of that.
So just because something feels old doesn't necessarily mean like, okay, it's out of copyright.
You know, in a related thing with music, I have supported financially an artist, a pianist who has been recording.
Like she did the open Goldberg variations and had a kickstarter to cover that.
The idea was to create a recording of Bach that would be freely available.
And I think that was a creative commons license that she used for that.
But, you know, if you get one done by, you know, Emmanuel Axe on a classical music label, guess what? It's under copyright.
So, if it's a current work, what really should be done is you should use the creative commons, no rights reserved.
And that is the preferred approach because that makes it explicit.
Remember, copyright law automatically places works under copyright.
So, you want to make it explicit that you're saying, no, I am voluntarily giving up my rights to this.
And if you use the creative commons, no rights reserved, that's usually abbreviated as CC0. That license covers it.
Now, where do you find stuff like this?
Well, you know, the ever-valuable Wikipedia comes to the rescue here. There is a Wikipedia page for public domain image resources.
I put a link in the show notes, but take a look at what they say here.
Public domain images should be marked with the public domain mark 1.0. Public domain mark enables works that are no longer restricted by copyright to be marked as such in a standard and simple way,
making them easily discoverable and available to others.
The public domain mark is recommended for works that are free of known copyright around the world. These will typically be very old works.
For a creator to release his or her works into the public domain, legally they must use the creative commons CC0 license which gives creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law.
The presence of a resource on this list, and this is Wikipedia talking about their page, does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are public domain.
You are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images before you submit them.
Now, they did this because people want to use images in creating Wikipedia pages, so it's kind of an internal, but still it's available to anyone.
And there's a lot of good resources on this. It's really worth checking out.
There's a collection of photo sites, some of them are government agencies, tends to be a little US centric on a lot of this stuff, but I live in the United States and my tax dollars help pay for them.
So you can find, for example, pictures from the Smithsonian Institution, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and so on.
They also let you search by subject area like art or history, literature, music, and then they have images collected from a number of countries.
Creative Commons also has a site where you can search for creative commons licensed material.
Again, link in the show notes. This lets you search using Boolean operators, so you could enter dog plus sign cat to get any images that had both a dog and a cat.
And there's other Boolean operators, and I put a link in the show notes to a page that explains all of that. It even lets you do fuzzy search.
Finally, many flicker account holders have licensed their content using Creative Commons licenses.
I have set mine to default to Creative Commons Cherylike.
So as you can see, there's a great wealth of imagery that can be used pretty freely.
There really is no excuse for using images that are not made available under relatively free licenses, in other words.
Well, the other thing we want to talk about today is fonts.
Again, there's a distinction here between what is truly public domain and what is the modern equivalent in Creative Commons or similar licensing.
There are a few public domain fonts which attained that status by being very old. On the Wikipedia page, they list five.
Baskerville, Badone, Caslan, Clarendon, and Garamond.
Now, public domain per se is limited in this area, and it is not the same thing as free fonts.
How many times have we seen that on a web page? What does that mean? Free to download? You know, you've got to be careful.
To quote from a useful short article, do you know why you need public domain fonts by Monica Valentinenelli?
And again, link in the show notes. Blently, public domain or open domain fonts are fonts you can use for commercial use.
Public domain fonts are not the same thing as free fonts. Simply free fonts means you don't have to pay for the font.
Public domain fonts allow you to use the font for professional use. Do you catch the distinction she's making?
You know, it's one thing to say I can download it for free. It's another thing to say I can use it for a brochure that is going to be printed and distributed for one of my customers.
Completely different scenario there.
Just because you have a Mac or a Windows font library that comes with your software doesn't necessarily mean you have the ability to incorporate those fonts into a professional project.
It's another little gotcha there. Just because they've given you those fonts when you buy the software doesn't necessarily mean you can use it commercially.
Repercussions of using non-public domain fonts can include lawsuits which will hurt your bottom line.
So the point is to be careful about licensing terms. For instance, one site I checked has its own free license. I had to click through several layers to find that out.
Now this is something I tend to give a sideways eye to. Much as I do when someone needs to invent a new software license, we already solve that problem folks.
We've got all the licenses we need. And when I got to the license terms it includes this clause.
The given typeface may be downloaded and used free of charge for both personal and commercial use as long as the usage is not racist or illegal.
Now I'm not a big fan of promoting racism. But who's deciding this? And in what jurisdiction? To me that's a huge red flag. I'm sorry. I am, you know, a thousand and one fonts.com is not going to get any business from me.
I checked out another site, the font.com and on the web page I see this little disclaimer. The fonts presented on this website are their author's property and are either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain.
The license mentioned above the download button is just an indication. Please look at the readme files in the archives or check the indicated author's website for details and contact him or her if in doubt if no author or license is indicated. That's because we don't have the information. That doesn't mean it's free.
So again, you know, lack of an explicit license term does not mean anything is free whether it's an image of font or whatever. If you don't have an explicit license, don't use it. So what's a good license? Well, I'm going to suggest a really good starting point is something called the open font license from SIL.
You can read about this. There's a Wikipedia page that gives a little description. If you really want to read the entire license, I've also put that link in the show notes. A small quote from this says that.
The open font license meets the specific needs of typographic design and engineering as well as the gold standards of the floss, parentheses free, Libre and open source software community, namely the culture of values and guidelines from the free software foundation, the Debian free software guidelines, as well as the open source definition.
It draws inspiration from concepts and elements found in other licenses, but our improvements in the specific area of fonts have made the licensing model work better than other approaches currently in use. Now, I like that.
Okay, if it's good enough for the free software foundation and the Debian group and the open source initiative, etc. I'm starting to feel like, okay, this is this is the real deal. Now, where do you find them? There's a few options here. One place you might not be aware of is Google fonts. Now, many, not all, but many of the fonts that you find at Google fonts are licensed under the SIL open font license.
Now, Google says that all of them are licensed under open licenses, but you've got to click through to see some of them, for instance, I've seen some that are licensed under the Apache license, which is also, you know, perfectly good license.
Now, to see the license, click on the font and scroll down to the bottom of the fonts page to see what the license is.
And you always want to do this. So, see, don't get caught and do this before you start using it, not at the end.
Now, another good source is something called the font library. Again, link in the show notes. They have a search option. You can go there and if you type in open font license, you will get back a large number of results of fonts that are specifically licensed with the open fonts license.
Now, how about installing fonts? That's something you need to do. So, in Windows 10, pretty easy, you search for fonts in the search box by the start menu, and then click on fonts in the control panel to open the fonts manager.
And then drag and drop or copy and paste any unzipped fonts into the fonts manager to install.
On a Macintosh, you would click the add button in the font book toolbar, locate and select the font, then click open.
You can also, an alternative, just drag the font file to the font book app icon or double-click the font file in the finder and click install font.
So, you've got a couple of different methods there. With Linux, it's a little more complicated, not terribly bad. Every distro does things a little bit differently.
So, what you want to do is start with the documentation for your distro, do a little Google searching.
I put a link in the show notes if you're using Ubuntu 20.04, which, as I'm recording this, is the current version.
By the time this show goes out on Hacker Public Radio, it'll be 2010.
So, for Ubuntu or distros like Mint that are based on Ubuntu, you can take a look at this webpage and follow what it says there.
If you're using other ones, I'm not going to try and go through every distro out there.
Now, remember that unlike images, which you download and use without having to do anything else, fonts need to be installed before you can use them.
So, there's a little bit of work there. You might want to take some time to find some fonts you like and install them before you start working on projects.
So, the bottom line is that if you want to be safe, be careful about the images and fonts you use, particularly in anything that will be publicly shared or used commercially.
As I plan to start doing examples to illustrate how Gimp works in practice, I will be using these resources.
So, with that, this is Hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and reminding you, as ever, to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye!
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