SpaceX has launched its first deep space mission last month, when the Falcon 9 rocket carried the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite into orbit.

During the mission, remarkable images were taken and some were made public, but some commentators noted a possible downside to the new era of privately-funded space exploration.

The photographs produced by every NASA mission can be put in the public domain but the same can’t be done in the case of SpaceX photos.

Usually, NASA photos are put into public domain by default, because the works that are created by the US federal government or its employees can't be copyrighted.

At the time, in an open letter to Elon Musk, Mike Masnick at Techdirt suggested that the best solution for the owner of SpaceX would be to simply put the images into the public domain.

Musk went through the letter, and has recognized the value of a robust public domain in other contexts, such as when he pledged not to enforce any of Tesla's patents on electric car technology.

The company, last week, responded to that concern through the creation of a Flickr account, in which it has released images under a Creative Commons license. Under the particular license, one is allowed for re-use but has some restrictions, like a ban on commercial re-use.

This weekend, on Twitter, Musk was asked, “Why not public domain? What is there to lose”? And he responded that it was a good point, and wrote just changed them to full public domain.

After the move, Musk won a lot of praise on Twitter and beyond.

Soon, there was a strange twist in the story, when all found that the SpaceX photos weren’t actually marked as public domain on Flickr, may be because there's no simple way to do so, but were marked with the least restrictive license that was available on the site. It was a CC-BY license that requires only attribution for any type of re-use.