Size Comparism Of The Moons Of The Gas Planets, Moon Systems of the gas giants compared Options

[Guest_spaceffm_*]

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[elakdawalla]

Hey, now, let's all play nice while Doug is away.

I, too was once very irritated by copyrights being splashed all over space images, which do all come from publicly supported missions. And I still think it's a bit much to claim copyright for doing something as simple as, say, adjusting the contrast in an image. But it's also true that some of the processing that is done to make these pictures is a tremendous amount of work, for which the worker should get credit. Furthermore, a lot of the processing work done by the so-called "amateur" community crosses the line into art. By calling it "art" I'm implying both positive and negative connotations -- the positive is that the images they create are truly beautiful; the negative is that they have to make up or fudge some information in the image to edit out blemishes, noise, seams, etc. Most scientists would never do that, and you'll rarely see images released by official agencies that have been fudged in that way. By indicating who gets the credit for the image you also inform whoever is looking at the picture how literally "true" the image is, and acknowledge the work of the artist.

Really, though, I'm not interested in the legalistic stuff; for me this debate comes down to being polite. It is polite and kind to ask permission from someone before taking an image from his or her website. For the most part, you will find these people to be delighted that you are interested in the work that they spent many hours producing. All they ask in return is that you give them credit for their work. In effect, this permission has already been asked for, and granted, from NASA/JPL; they have given a blanket permission to all who use their images -- themselves the product of an incredible amount of work on the part of hundreds of scientists, engineers, and IT people -- for educational purposes for the reuse of their images -- and they should be credited! I've already asked permission from Ted Stryk and Mattias Malmer and Doug Ellison and Olivier de Goursac to use the images that they've worked on on my website, and they have given their permission enthusiastically. What's the harm in asking permission? In the end, it's a way of opening a friendly dialogue among all of us who, after all, share interests in gazing at the beautiful images returned from our robot explorers. Many of you might find this asking of permission to be a great way to make contact with the scientists who produce the official images too. It's a very polite way to open a dialogue, and I'll bet you'd find that you'd either get a pleased response or be ignored, that you'd probably never be denied permission.

Which reminds me...at the risk of being hopelessly sentimental, I'd like to advocate that those robot explorers be acknowledged in image credits too, where space allows of course. They gave their 'lives' to us to return these images.

--Emily