File:Dunklin co4.jpg

• File:2014ColumbiaMSEF3.jpg
• File:PraderScott Rochelle.jpg
• File:2015MountHopeTornado.jpg
• File:Weather-related traffic collision on the Kansas Turnpike.JPG
• File:Wall cloud near Abingdon, Illinois June 5, 2010.JPG
• File:Dunklin co4.jpg
• File:Tornado in Kansas May 10, 2010.jpg
• File:AuroraTor4 LookingNorth.jpg
• File:EF2CarpenterWyomingTornado2017.jpg
• File:El Reno, OK supercell from above 2013-05-31.jpg

These images were all sourced from webpages of the US National Weather Service but are the work of third-party photographers.

For many years, hosting such images on the Commons was done under the rationale that:

• a process used for a time by the NWS Sioux City regional office that placed photos taken by the public into the public domain as a term of submisison applied to all third party images across all of weather.gov
• the wording of the general site disclaimer on weather.gov that says "The information on National Weather Service (NWS) Web pages are in the public domain, unless specifically noted otherwise" means "noted with a formal copyright notice" (and ignoring the wording later in the disclaimer that goes on to say "Third-party information and imagery are used under license by the individual third-party provider. [...] Please contact the third-party provider for information on your rights to further use these data/products.")

An extensive review of this rationale in 2024 revealed that:

• the NWS has had multiple, conflicting processes for public image submissions over the decades, some running concurrently by different regional offices (examples). Some of these processes made release into the public domain a condition of submission, others did not, and some were ambiguous. In practice, we can almost never link a particular image to any particular submission process.
• in every one of several dozen cases investigated, individual photographers and third-party organizations had not released their work into the public domain when they submitted it for the NWS to use, and still asserted their rights over their images.(examples) This indicates that either the site general disclaimer is not intended to be interpreted the way that uploaders to the Commons have interpreted it over the years, or that this interpretation is correct, but that NWS employees have applied notices to images so very inconsistently over the years as to render the disclaimer completely unreliable.

These findings were confirmed in an RfC conducted from August to October 2024.

Per COM:ONUS it is the responsibility of the person uploading an image to the Commons or anyone arguing for its retention here to obtain permission of the copyright holder. Nevertheless, to expedite this process (and because throughout this review period, the people arguing most strenuously for retention have been remarkably reticent to actually ask photographers about the copyright status of their images), I have approached every one of the creators I have been able to identify.