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UK's National Portrait Gallery Threatens To Sue Wikipedia User
jpatokal writes "The National Portrait Gallery of London is threatening litigation against a Wikipedia user over his uploading of pictures of some 3,000 paintings, all 19th century or earlier and firmly in the public domain. Their claim? The photos are a 'product of a painstaking exercise on the part of the photographer,' and that downloading them off the NPG site is an 'unlawful circumvention of technical measures.' And remember, the NPG's taxpayer-funded mission is to 'promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media [...] to as wide a range of visitors as possible!'"
The NPG's UK taxpayer-funded mission.
So they're working under UK law. It kinda sucks that our copyright laws and, in some ways, less friendly than the US. Even stuff the government itself produces is not public domain over here. But that's the law here, that's how it works.
Making a high resolution reproduction of a work of art requires special equipment and skills, so I really think it's fair enough if that's copyright - somebody has invested money, skills and effort in making the reproduction be as good as possible. The situation is different in the US but the NPG ain't in the US. If the UK taxpayer funded it and UK law says that it's copyrightable, you can understand the NPG feeling the need to protect the UK taxpayer's investment by maintaining control of the images.
Given they control their own reproductions of the pictures, would it be acceptable for them to deny visitors the right to take their own photographs? I think not. But that's a separate debate because this guy didn't go there and invest the time to make photographs that he would then have had copyright on under UK law, he downloaded them from the National Gallery's website. I agree with the many posters before me that whilst it somewhat sucks that these creative works aren't available digitally in the public domain, the NPG are really being pretty reasonable about this - they've offered to work out terms for lower resolution imagery to be made available to Wikipedia, which is a lot more constructive than you'd expect from a corporate entity. It really looks like they're trying to defend their legal position sensibly whilst still facilitating the transfer of information - good for them.
But, please, Wikipedia users and everyone else - feel free to increase pressure on our government and institutions (and those in other countries) to have a strong public domain and sensible, fair copyright laws. We still have further to go, it's just a question of how we choose to represent ourselves.