Views of the Earth

Licensing images

I assembled some general information on the matter of licensing Views of the Earth images here. If you are interested in licensing an image from me or having a custom image produced for your purposes you should read this. If you have further questions or want to make an image inquiry you can contact me.

First of all the Views of the Earth are not available to be licensed for arbitrary purposes. So even if you find one of my images to be very suited for your purposes it won't be possible to license it unless the intended use is directly related to my work. In such cases i decide on a per case basis and there will be no or only a nominal license fee.

There are a number of views available that are not among the Views of the Earth and that have been created for other purposes. These views are available for licensing.

What i also offer is creating custom views for specific uses. These can be based on existing Views of the Earth or completely new views of areas not yet covered. Such commissioned views are created according to customer specifications and can be licensed for a wide scope of uses including exclusive licensing.

Pricing for this depends on the particular subject of the view, the necessary data preparation work and the size of the image required.

I also made available some of the Views of the Earth under a Creative Commons license.

Reasons for this licensing policy

The limitations on licensing the Views of the Earth outlined above frequently cause astonishment among those who are interested in using the images. I want to try explaining some of my reasons behind implementing these rules here to prevent possible misunderstandings.

The Views of the Earth were and are produced for fun, for my own enjoyment. The suitability of the images for being used elsewhere and for earning money through licensing fees did not play a role in their production. The variety of views you can find here - both in terms of style and subject - is owed to this fact. If i had created images only for the purpose of licensing them a large percentage of the images you can see here would have never been produced.

By changing the licensing policy i would also change the character of this collection of images - not necessarily to the better. Therefore the Views of the Earth are not generally available for paid licenses.