Elon Musk made SpaceX photos public domain because of a tweet

Earlier this week, SpaceX published a batch of 100 photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons license, which gave the public the ability to download and use the images with proper attribution. It was a voluntary and interesting move by Elon Musk, but some felt it didn’t go far enough. Creative Commons photos still have rights reserved and some can’t be used commercially.

When Musk announced the move on Twitter, some users wondered why he didn’t just make the photos public domain.

Apparently, there wasn’t much to lose. Musk responded to and acted upon the request of a random Twitter user in under an hour.

Under public domain, the photos can be downloaded and built upon without any restrictions. This whole interaction is a testament to Twitter’s ability to connect big names to anonymous internet users, which is not always a good thing. But in this case, Twitter worked the way it would in an ideal world, and our prize is SpaceX photos.

Here’s something else we now know: Elon Musk reads his Twitter mentions.