Licensing and reuse

Every photo in the photo gallery has its own page, and that page shows the credit and, where one exists, a link to the licence itself. The licence text is the authority. Nothing on this page overrides it, and where the two ever disagree, the licence on the image wins.

If a photo page shows a licence link, you already have your answer and do not need to write to us. Follow the conditions it states and you are done.

Our own photographs, where nobody is identifiable. Photographs taken by this newsroom of buildings, signage, public facilities and landscapes are published under CC BY 4.0. Use them anywhere, including commercially, including modified, as long as you credit the photographer named on the photo page and say what you changed.

Photographs from open archives. A large part of the gallery is imported from public archives and carries the licence the original photographer chose, commonly a Creative Commons licence or a public-domain dedication. We are not the rights holder for these. Credit the photographer shown on the photo page, not us.

These are reserved, and the reason is not ours. Much of our own photography is of people at public meetings: assembly members, officials, residents testifying. We hold the copyright in those photographs and could licence them openly. We do not, on purpose.

A Creative Commons licence covers copyright and grants nothing over a person’s likeness. We own the photograph; we do not own the face in it. Publishing those images under an open licence would tell the world to reuse a picture of an identifiable Alaskan commercially, forever, on the strength of a permission the subject never gave. Creative Commons licences cannot be revoked, so that is not a decision we could walk back later.

If you want to use one, ask. We answer, and for non-commercial and journalistic use the answer is usually yes.

AI-generated covers. Many articles carry an illustration generated by an image model, labelled AI image beneath the picture. We offer no licence on these, because we do not believe there is a copyright in them to licence. We are not going to claim ownership of something in order to grant you permission we may have no standing to grant.

Photographs used under fair use. Some covers are third-party images used in a news context. Fair use is a defence available to a publisher, not a right we can pass to you. Go to the rights holder.

Photographs used with permission. Some covers are licensed to this newsroom privately. That permission covers us and does not extend to anyone else, so we cannot sublicense them.

Not openly licensed. Quoting is welcome. Quote us with attribution and a link, at the length ordinary journalism quotes anything. You do not need permission for that and you do not need to ask.

Republishing a whole article is different, so ask. We are usually glad to say yes, particularly to other Alaska outlets, community newsletters, tribal and borough communications, and classrooms. What we want back is a credit and a link to the original, not a fee.

The underlying facts are nobody’s property. What was decided at an assembly meeting is not ours, and reporting the same facts yourself needs nothing from us. Every article names and links the source it was drafted from, precisely so you can go to that source instead of to us.

Most of our articles are drafted by a machine and we say so on each one. What that means, and what a human did or did not do before publication, is on the AI policy page.

The voice is synthetic, and that limits what we can grant. Our narration is generated by text-to-speech from the article text. Two different things sit in one file: our article, and a voice produced under a licence from the company whose model made it. We can speak for the first and not the second, so we do not offer these recordings for redistribution.

Listening and sharing the page is not the same as redistribution. Play it, link to it, embed the article page, put it in front of a room. Audio files are served through short-lived signed links rather than permanent URLs, so a hotlink will break on you; link to the article, which will not.

If you want a recording for a broadcast, a podcast segment or an accessibility use, ask. That is a normal request and the answer is usually yes.

Our short videos live on YouTube.Where an article has one, the player on the page is YouTube’s and what you may do with it is governed by YouTube’s terms, not ours. Embedding through YouTube is always fine. Downloading and re-uploading elsewhere is not something we can authorise here.

Meeting clips are somebody else’s recording. Clips of public meetings come from a recording made by the governing body or its broadcaster. We did not create that footage and we hold no rights to hand on. If you need the video itself, go to the body that recorded the meeting, which every article names.

We claim nothing creative in a transcript. A transcript is a machine rendering of what was said in a public meeting. We are not going to pretend that is an authored work of ours in order to charge you for it.

What we do ask is that you check it against the recording.Machine transcription misheard names, motions and numbers, and a transcript quoted as though it were the record can put words in a real person’s mouth. The meeting recording is the record; the transcript is a way to find your way around it.

Transcript access is part of a subscription, which pays for the transcription rather than for rights in the words.

Write to [email protected] or use the contact page. Include the URL of the page you are asking about. For a photograph that is the photo page, which identifies the exact image and tells us immediately which category above it falls into; for anything else the article URL does the same job.

Tell us what you want to do with it. A classroom, a nonprofit newsletter and a national advertising campaign are different questions, and knowing which one you are asking is what lets us answer quickly instead of asking you a second time.

If you are the person in the photograph, say so. Requests from subjects about their own image are handled by the newsroom rather than treated as licensing enquiries, and they are not conditional on paying anything.