On 1/13/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
1. Many, if not most, photos on US government websites are *not* in the
public domain. Like many companies, the government makes considerable
use of stock photos. If the site doesn't clearly indicate that the image
was created by a federal government employee, you should assume that it
wasn't.
One additional bit on this: many government agencies are run by contractors,
and contractors can have entirely different (i.e. non-free) intellectual
property rights than "employees of the federal government", *even* if the
work is done under apparently government auspices and entirely with
government money. For example, Sandia National Laboratories is a U.S.
Department of Energy National Laboratory but it has and claims the rights to
retain copyrights on its materials, as is spelled out in the contracts with
the DOE and the company who manages the lab, Lockheed Martin. So even if the
agency says it created the content, it may still not be free in many
instances! (This comes up primarily with the many DOE labs, which are all
run by contractors. I've tried to post the copyright statements that I could
find of the individual labs to the talk page fo the PD-USGov-DOE template.
Most are not free enough for Wikipedia.)
FF