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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 paintings may be in the public domain, but the photographs are copyright to the photographer.
So good luck to the dipshit user who uploaded them.
I don't know if this is viable in London as I don't live there. But if it's remotely an option, then there are times when jury nullification is called for.
A good explanation of the concept can be found here.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
How is this modded Troll? It's a correct statement of U.K. law and relevant to the article. What, does using the word "dipshit" automatically make something a troll post? Honestly, come on Slashdot..
That depends on whether the moderator agrees with you. If they do, then it's alright. If they don't, they are highly offended by your use of foul language. That level of maturity, dispassionate review, and strong character is amazing is it not?
Fuck it, I get tired of seeing that too and I have karma to burn. The difference between a good mod and a bad mod is that the good ones focus on promoting desirable posts. If they want to mod me down for saying this then they waste their points which is fine by me.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
They aren't even derivative works. They're just copies. THEY'RE COPIES.
If you think that harvesting a few thousand images off of a website, then properly linking them into the Wikipedia is easy, then you clearly haven't tried making simple digital copies.
If you think that making a few thousand proper reproductions through photography or scanning is easy, then properly documenting building a gallery website out of those images is easy, then you clearly haven't tried bridging the analog and digital world.
A few things to consider: photography is hard, at least if you expect a decent result from it. You need to consider factors such as lighting and colour, and balance those out with the camera's limitations (such as the response curve of the photodetector to light and colour). Scanning a painting may make it easier, particularly when it comes to lighting and colour correction, but they can't exactly rush out an buy the cheapest model from the local discount electronics store. At the very least, you would need a large format scanner to handle most artwork. (Damn those artists who didn't paint on legal size paper, sometimes choosing a canvas that is just a fraction of an inch too deep.) Yet a commercial large format scanner probably wouldn't do the job either. You see, curators tend to be a wee bit finicky about what their collections are exposed to. They probably don't want to deal with the subtle alterations in the paint/dye chemistry that results from exposure to particular wavelengths of light or poor handling. I think that prior generations of curators and librarians learned from prior projects, such as the massive attempts to transfer works to microfiche or microfilm in decades past, that it is always best to maintain an original.
So while I have a hard time supporting the gallery's actions, I can also see that their digitization projects are non-trivial and that they probably should have the rights to deal with the results according to their own desires.