Archive & Atlas Data & training-data licensing Consent-gated · by agreement

License the catalog as data

Beyond single images, the archive can be licensed as structured data: for research, for products, and yes, for model training. But training-data licensing here is bounded by something most providers skip — the consent of the people who gave us the work.

Opt intraining is off until a contributor turns it on
Per workrecorded as a versioned consent, not a blanket term
They sharecontributors share in what their work earns, data deals included
I

The consent gate

The one rule the rest of this page follows from
Unbundled

Training is opt-in

Training use is an unbundled, opt-in setting on each work, recorded as a versioned consent. A training-data license from us covers only the works whose contributors explicitly opted in.

Not implied

Open licensing is separate

A work being openly licensed does not put it in the training set. The two are deliberately separate, because permission to reuse a photograph and permission to train on it are not the same question. If a contributor didn't agree to training, their work isn't in the offer — full stop.

II

What can be licensed

Three shapes · all by agreement
Catalogue data Structured metadata for the public archive — titles, makers, dates, places, subjects, rights. The free read tier already gives you much of this; see Developers.
Image corpora For research or for training, scoped to the consented set, with provenance and license attached to every single item. Never a bare bag of pixels.
Bulk / high-volume API Beyond the free read tier, by agreement. If you only need to stay current rather than pull everything, the ResourceSync change list is free and is probably what you actually want.
Consent recorded per work, per version
III

What we will not do

Four refusals

No unconsented training

We won't license work for training that wasn't consented for it. Not for a bigger deal, not for a better price.

No stripped provenance

We won't remove provenance to make a dataset tidier. Where a photograph came from travels with it.

No laundering

We won't pretend a license settles the rights of the people inside the photographs. It doesn't, and saying so plainly is part of the deal.

No silent cut

Contributors share in what their work earns — data deals included. That is a term of the arrangement, not a gesture.

IV

Start a data conversation

A person replies · not a self-serve dump

Tell us the use and the scope. We'll be straight about what is and isn't licensable under the consent that actually exists — including when the answer is no.

We'll be straight about what is and isn't licensable under contributor consent.