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This is a bit off-topic, but I'm surprised that the NASA image is listed as CC-BY. I was under the impression that NASA imagery was public domain by default.

Their website [1] says "NASA content [...] generally are not copyrighted." It then goes on to say that "NASA should be acknowledged as the source of the material." IANAL, but I would assume that if the data is not copyrighted, then there's no need to attribute the source, making that "should" pretty toothless.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html




Note the "generally" there. Further down it says explicitly "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". In their Flickr page they have selected the CC BY-NC 2.0 license so this works, I think, as a notice of copyright that at the same time grants you a license to use the image (provided you follow the terms of said license).


If it is a work of NASA itself, it shouldn't be subject to copyright. Wikimedia has noticed their assertions:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/NASA_images

It's easy to imagine that NASA has more limited rights to reproduce and redistribute images produced by their partners though, and they have lots of partners.




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