Guide · 7 min read
Using public-domain artwork without getting a copyright strike
Openly licensed artwork is the most reliable source of visuals for short video — but "free to view" and "free to publish" are different things, and the difference is where people get caught.
What the licences actually mean
Public domain means copyright has expired or was never claimed. You can use the work for anything, including commercially, without permission or credit. Most paintings made before the early twentieth century fall here.
CC0 is a deliberate waiver: the rights holder has given up their claim. Practically it behaves like public domain. Several major museums release their photography of collection items under CC0.
CC BY requires attribution. This is where video gets awkward — you must credit the source visibly, and a caption buried under the post usually does not satisfy the licence. CC BY-SA adds a requirement that derivative works carry the same licence, which is a problem for a video you publish commercially. CC BY-NC forbids commercial use altogether, and a monetised or brand-promoting account is commercial use.
For published video the safe set is narrow: public domain and CC0. Everything else needs a decision you probably do not want to make per image.
Where to find it
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — a large open-access collection with a public API; filter to paintings rather than searching the whole catalogue.
- The Art Institute of Chicago — open API, clear licence fields per object.
- The Cleveland Museum of Art — open access, straightforward filtering by type.
- Openverse — aggregates openly licensed media from many sources; check the licence on each result rather than trusting the search.
- Wikimedia Commons — enormous, but mixed: it contains public-domain scans alongside CC BY-SA photographs, so the licence field matters.
Two traps worth knowing
Unfiltered searches return catalogue photography, not art. Museum collections include furniture, pocket watches and ivory boxes, all photographed against grey studio backgrounds. In a video these look like product shots. Filtering explicitly to paintings solves it.
Full-text search returns book scans. Searching a phrase on a large archive will surface scanned title pages and catalogue covers, which arrive as images full of unexpected text. If you are pulling images programmatically, filter these out by looking for document-like results.
A note on photographs of paintings
In some jurisdictions a faithful photographic reproduction of a public-domain two-dimensional artwork attracts no new copyright, and museums releasing under CC0 are making that position explicit. Where a museum instead claims rights over its photography, treat the photograph's licence as the one that governs your use.