Unleashing the Swarm
The University of Texas crowdfunded its own photo library to make insect images public domain
Evolutionary biologist Alex Wild wants to give you free pictures of bugs. Not only is he the Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas, Wild is also a photographer who is something of an expert in the finer points of photographing insects.
There’s a big demand for high quality images from scientific fields, but the process of securing and paying for a licensed image is laborious. A lot of people just steal. Wild’s own images have been published without credit or payment, so he set out to do something about it.
“When 95 percent of the uses of your commercial and professional work are illegal, that does tend to focus your attention on it,” he says. “There’s something about photographs that people just sort of assume exist independent of the photographer, and their time, and their gear.”
To address this problem for both sides, Wild and UT teamed up to fund a selection of images to be published under public domain CC0 waiver. Now successfully funded via UT’s own crowdfunding site Hornraiser, Insects Unlocked will create a publicly accessible database of high quality photos, taken by students for school credit.
Images of wildlife — particularly at insectile scales — are exciting on a number of levels. Firstly of course, nature is inherently fascinating and beautiful, and science images tend to have significant informational value. But perhaps most importantly these images draw the attention to a world that surrounds us but which we often fail to notice.
“Most people aren’t aware of all of the drama and activity surrounding insects, since they’re around them all the time. Photography helps people to see what’s out there, but there’s actually nothing unusual about that — that’s what photography does for any field,” says Wild.
For any country that observes the Berne Convention (pretty much every country), copyright is automatically granted as soon as an original work is recorded in some fashion. It’s kind of a blanket policy that assumes your creative work is protected by virtue of having come from your brain. It’s so automatic that you will need to go through a laborious process in order to remove the protection. Some countries don’t allow even that, and the protection extends to basically every kind of media imaginable, including artfully made photographs of insects.
Many government-funded programs produce images that fall into the public domain automatically — NASA is a prolific example, or the USGS whose bee monitoring program runs a public domain Flickr feed that directly inspired Insects Unlocked.
Because of these programs, people often see an image of a bug and assume that it’s automatically free to use. Of course this is not the case, but all it takes is one person republishing an image without attribution for it to multiply and swarm throughout the web as other people assume the same. This is what happened to Wild, who saw many of his images pilfered from the front pages of university websites, to which he freely offered them.
“I was saying, ‘Yeah I want people to know what a fire ant looks like,’” Wild says, “But then because the images are appearing on the university extension webpage, it leaves the impression to a lot of people that it’s actually a government-funded image”
The $10,000 that was raised for Insects Unlocked will go toward paying for cameras to give to biology students, who will be taught not only the taxonomic distinctions they’re observing in nature, but also how to make great photographs of the critters. Wild has a lot of experience in both disciplines. At the blog he writes for Scientific American, cleverly called Compound Eye, Wild runs down the many facets of artfully executed scientific photography he’s learned in his own practice.
“If there are many insects in a picture, there’s often some sense of subject or personality emerging, and so I’m trying to capture an insect in a way that makes people empathize with it. In technical terms that means often getting right down to the subject as an equal rather than down at it as people often do,” says Wild. “You’ll often realize that there’s actually a key individual in there among them, there’s one ant that stands out in some particular way.”
Photographs are powerful tools for communicating about science. They get a great deal of information across in a widely accessible way. They adorn research papers and the pages of glossy magazines for their beauty as much as their utility in conveying knowledge. Such images should be accessible to anybody who needs or wants them, but those who put in the time, energy and resources to produce them for compensation should be protected as well.
Wild estimates it costs him about $50 to produce a given image, factoring time, travel expenses, equipment, etc. This is why his images look so good, and it’s rare to find scientific images of that quality which are also free.
The project was funded quickly, likely because the demand Wild sees is a real one. The images his students take — probably at varying degrees of quality and requiring some curation — will be posted to Wikimedia commons and Flickr under a CC0. That way, the students get to learn, and we all get free pictures. Hopefully it’s enough to settle some of the tricky rights ambiguities between art and science. Wild would certainly like to keep his focus on both without having to worry about copyright at all.
“I only got into it because I was into insects, and having nice photos of these things goes a long way toward explaining what I do,” says Wild. “I have a very moderate position on copyright, I’m just very vocal about it.”
All photos from Insects Unlocked and dedicated to the public domain using CCO.
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