Publishing site Lulu partners with Getty Images

Lulu.com, a site that lets members publish, print and sell their own books, has entered into a multiyear agreement with stock-photo giant Getty Images.

In this deal, Getty will provide its royalty-free--but still copyright-protected--image database to Lulu so that its members can use the contents in their self-published books, photo books and calendars. Lulu has emphasized the copyright-friendly nature of the agreement, explaining in a release that the high-resolution version of a Getty image is not "married" to a Lulu book until right before production. This way, according to Lulu, digital rights management restrictions on the stock images are honored.

Partnering with a company that specializes in copyrighted images is somewhat unusual for a company like Lulu, whose roots are definitively open source. The self-publishing site was founded by Robert Young, who co-founded Red Hat Linux along with Marc Ewing in 1994.

In addition to offering self-publishing on demand to members, Lulu has also sold titles from the Internet Archive's Open Library, considered by some to be an open-source equivalent to Google's controversial Library Project.

Lulu touts 200,000 recently published titles with more than 5,000 additions each week. In addition to selling self-published books, the site also offers e-books, CDs, DVDs, and music and software downloads, with editorial and copyright control in the hands of the individual publisher. There's no fee to publish on Lulu, but the site does take a commission from each sale.

The Getty database will be available to Lulu members beginning this summer.

[acfou]

FlickrCash similarly offers FREE, LICENSED images from Flickr TODAY

www.flickrcash.com

- search interface to find Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr (tens of millions)

- archived licenses for public inspection forever (sample: http://flickrcash.com/lightbox_install/r6oz1yt6 )

- so images can be used commercially or non-commercially with attribution

see this post from CreativeCommons.org
"FlickrCash - The Most Sophisticated Flickr/CC mashup yet"
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7390