• File:1963snow-1.jpg (source) (1963)
• File:71108 willmar tornado.jpg (source (archived)) (2008)
• File:2016-05-25 EF4 Chapman KS Tornado.jpg (source) (2016)

The uploaders sourced these files from the website of the US National Weather Service. All photos were taken in the United States. The second and third photos were taken after 1989. The first photo was taken in 1963, but appears to have been a photo from a family photo album submitted to the NWS as part of a public outreach. Its first known appearance on an NWS site is in 2004 and the following analysis assumes that the NWS website was its first publication and that this therefore took place after 1989.

The rationale for hosting them on the Commons has been:

• a belief when the NWS general website disclaimer states that information on there site is "in the public domain, unless specifically noted otherwise" it necessarily means noted with a formal copyright notice, and that the absence of a formal notice accompanying an image equates to an assertion by the NWS that the image is in the public domain. (see also a previous DR for the 2008 image that kept it on the basis of this belief).
• a set of terms and conditions used for a time by the NWS Sioux City office for public contributions

However:

1. There is nothing to connect any of these images with the Sioux City office (they were published by the Huntsville, Twin Cities, and Topeka offices respectively)
2. A recent analysis of over 200 third-party images has found that whatever the NWS intends by "specifically noted otherwise" in their disclaimer, images that are known to be protected by copyright are routinely published on NWS websites without formal copyright notices, or sometimes without any attribution at all. Very many examples exist, spanning major media outlets, photographers who claim that they never relinquished their rights to their photos, and permissions granted to the NWS in public that did not include release into the public domain. Not a single one of these was published by the NWS with a formal copyright notice.

The most likely conclusion is that the NWS does not intend "specifically noted otherwise" to mean "specifically noted with a formal copyright notice". Alternatively, if that really is the intention of those words, the NWS has deviated from this intention so thoroughly as to render the disclaimer unreliable as an assertion of public domain status.

Over the last month, I have been reviewing the copyright and licensing statuses of files for which we previously relied on the above rationale. As I have been progressing, I have been reaching out to photographers for verification of whether they ever gave up their copyright, and if not, whether they would be willing to do so now.

In these three cases, this is complicated because the photographers (and presumed original rights holders) are deceased:

• 1963 image -- two photographers credited (technically only one of which could have been the creator) believed deceased Jan 3, 2009[1][2] and Jan 26, 2012[3]
• 2008 image -- believed deceased April 24, 2024 [4][5]
• 2016 image -- believed deceased November 13, 2021[6]

Any copyrights they retained in these images would now be property of their estates or heirs.

There is no evidence that any of these people released their work into the public domain, and there is now no straightforward way to ask them. Any such exercise would involve determining the new rights holder.

Personally, I do not want to intrude on these bereaved families, not least of which because at least two of these deaths occurred under particularly tragic circumstances. And to keep these images purely on the basis that the dead can't say "no" feels like grave robbing to me.