Here we go again!

Corbis, a photo licensing agency owned by Bill Gates, currently offers expensive rights-managed licences for historical Australian and US images that are otherwise available for free in the public domain.

This photo of ‘G.W. Goyders Survey Expedition to Northern Territory’, taken between 1868-1870, costs US$45 for a three month rights-managed license from Corbis. Source: Corbis

PC Mag writer John Drovak was the first to make this observation, using the example of a photo shot in 1862 of a US battleship, with a licence available ‘for between US$110 to US$1735’ by Corbis.

What’s cheeky is the same image is available for free from the US Library of Congress, as US copyright law says any image dated before 1923 falls into the public domain. Despite this, the agency still has copyright insignia stamped on the image, suggesting it is protected by copyright. And who owns the copyright? Well, Corbis reckons it owns the versions on its website (and you must pay!), but anyone can access the same image copyright free from the Library of Congress. (Is it just me, or is this a little reminiscent of trying to ‘sell’ the Sydney Harbour Bridge?)

Drovak notes that the agency forgets to highlight that these images are available for free.

‘Does Corbis ever tell its customers that these images belong in the public domain? I see no evidence of it,’ he wrote. ‘Because of the outrageous prices for something that should be free, you assume they own the pictures somehow. It’s impossible to own these public-domain images. The company should be ashamed of itself.’

A person who said they were a former employee at Corbis posted in the tech-blog Boing Boing forums that in most cases Corbis has higher resolution copies of the images.

‘The images you get from Corbis have been cleaned, colour-corrected and/or white-black balanced, etc. The resolution is often higher than the public domain scans. Sometimes Corbis has the original negative, while the public domain relies on a second, third, or higher generation copy. In other words, the Corbis quality is almost always much higher.’

Well, that explains the price tag! At least Corbis isn’t selling images for peanuts. Any photographer, or um, image collector would be fairly pleased with a 20 percent cut of US$1735 from licensing an image.

In Australia, copyright for photographs lasts for the creator’s life, plus 70 years. And it didn’t take long for Pro Counter to stumble on a large collection of images on the Corbis site that likely belong in the public domain.

A collection of 76 historical Australian photos, most of which pre-date the turn of the 20th century, are credited to ‘Cannon Collection/Australian Picture Library/Corbis’.

It’s unclear who or what exactly Cannon Collection or Australian Picture Library is, and such information isn’t easily tracked down. It isn’t linked to any government entities or businesses – just the Corbis account.

And it appears that these photos do actually generate revenue for Corbis.

A psychology textbook, From Inquiry to Understanding, printed in 2012 by Pearson Australia, references ‘Cannon Collection/Australian Picture Library/Corbis’ in its photo credits. It would have shelled out US$246 if the current prices applied when the textbook went to press.

The photo in the psychology textbook. ‘Staff at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station Northern Territory’, 1895 – 1901. Source: Corbis

The photo is dated from somewhere between 1895 and 1901 according to Corbis, and there’s a possibility the anonymous photographer was young when it was captured and lived a long life (placing the image within copyright). But that’s unlikely, and unfortunately there’s no simple way to prove it without information about the original photographer.

One of the oldest Australian images available for a rather pricey licence fee was taken in 1879, and shows a group posing for a photo during the Sydney International Exhibition. The image is credited to John Carnemolla/Corbis, and a quick look at Carnemolla’s collection on Corbis shows both historical Australian images taken during the 19th century, as well as wildlife photos taken as recently as 2012.

Source: Corbis

Now, we’re taught in journalism school never to assume anything, but the heck with that – there’s no way that Carnemolla sketched a portrait of Captain Cook in the 1700s; photographed the Sydney Exhibition in 1879; a Tasmanian tiger in 1935; Paul Hogan holding a glass of beer in 1971; only to again pick up a camera in his later years to photograph Warrick Capper in a Sydney Swans guernsey.

What’s more likely is that Carnemolla is a collector and has somehow come to own the negatives or original photos – yet Corbis still says he photographed all the above events. (His shot of the Tassie Tiger had a run in the Daily Mail, and Carnemolla has also authored a photo book called Australia Life in the Sixties and Seventies.)

We started second-guessing our (hard won) understanding of copyright law, and just to be certain Pro Counter asked Intellectual Property lawyer, Sharon Givoni, to confirm that once copyright has expired, ‘it is in the public domain and people can use it’, regardless if a private collector owns it.

But obviously a private collector would have control over how the photos are used and they cannot be forced to submit them to national archives.

And Corbis isn’t the only one licensing public domain images. Carnemolla’s Shutterstock account has the same combination of new and old images.

As Drovak observed, Corbis and other agencies make no indication that a copyright has expired and even implies they are still protected. Nor would it be in its interest to do so – it could interfere with profits.

But there’s very little stopping anyone from stockpiling a collection of photos from online national archives – photos that belong in the public domain – and licensing them through stock agencies. Well, at least I know what to do next if this whole journalism thing doesn’t work out…