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New Developments In NPG/Wikipedia Lawsuit Threat
Raul654 writes "Last week, it was reported that the UK's National Portrait Gallery had threatened a lawsuit against an American Wikipedian for uploading pictures from the NPG's website to Wikipedia. The uploaded pictures are clearly in the public domain in the United States. (In the US, copies of public domain works are also in the public domain. UK law on the matter is unclear.) Since then, there have been several developments: EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann has taken on the case pro-bono; Eric Moeller, Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director, has responded to the NPG's allegations in a post on the WMF blog; and the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has weighed in on the dispute in favor of the NPG."
Defenders of the Wikimedia Foundation say the images are in the public domain (even though they aren't under UK law) and applaud Coetzee as if he were some kind of Robin Hood. Unfortunately, it's a case of the poor stealing from the poor. If all museum images were simply appropriated by file-sharers under the rationale that they *should* be in the public domain, pretty soon there wouldn't be any museum willing to pay for the digitization of important works, and we'd all be worse off. See the rest of my argument here: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/07/17/art-isnt-free-the-tragedy-of-the-wikimedia-commons/
http://www.spanisharts.com/prado/prado.htm
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/prado/
El Prado, Spain's biggest museum offers high resolution reproductions of its collection through google earth, and probably elsewhere too. They're such high quality you can get down to brush strokes.
Although IMO, there's something about seeing the painting/art work in person that can't be replaced by viewing it on a monitor. Something is lost if you see it on screen, especially if the space that you visit it in is repurposed or designed for the piece in question. This especially applies to sculpture.
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
Thank you for taking the time to contact the National Portrait Gallery. Please see below the Gallery's position statement: The National Portrait Gallery is very strongly committed to giving access to its Collection. In the past five years the Gallery has spent around £1 million digitising its Collection to make it widely available for study and enjoyment. We have so far made available on our website more than 60,000 digital images, which have attracted millions of users, and we believe this extensive programme is of great public benefit. The Gallery supports Wikipedia in its aim of making knowledge widely available and we would be happy for the site to use our low-resolution images, sufficient for most forms of public access, subject to safeguards. However, in March 2009 over 3000 high-resolution files were appropriated from the National Portrait Gallery website and published on Wikipedia without permission. The Gallery is very concerned that potential loss of licensing income from the high-resolution files threatens its ability to reinvest in its digitisation programme and so make further images available. It is one of the Gallery's primary purposes to make as much of the Collection available as possible for the public to view. Digitisation involves huge costs including research, cataloguing, conservation and highly-skilled photography. Images then need to be made available on the Gallery website as part of a structured and authoritative database. To date, Wikipedia has not responded to our requests to discuss the issue and so the National Portrait Gallery has been obliged to issue a lawyer's letter. The Gallery remains willing to enter into a dialogue with Wikipedia. This statement will be published on the National Portrait Gallery's website in due course. Once again, thank you for your feedback. I do hope that you will be able to visit the National Portrait Gallery both online (www.npg.org.uk - where visitors can freely view more than 60,000 low resolution digital images of works in the Collection) and in person in the near future. Yours sincerely, Helen
What we need is a UK Wikipedian to go down to the NPG and snap some photos and put them on Wikimedia under a CC license so this can all be dropped. I know in DC the Smithsonians sometimes don't allow flash photography when it could damage the work but I think that's only on special items and items that have been lent to the museum from a private/personal collection. So respect them and avoid those pictures. Any art teachers out there in the UK that want to offer their kids extra credit for some point and shoot photography and correctly labeling/wikipedia-ing the photos?
We would do it if we could. But in most UK galleries (the Tate, the Tate Modern, the NG, the NPG and lots of others), photography is expressly forbidden even without flash -- and it is vigorously enforced. This regulation was put in place to prevent exactly the scenario that you describe.
No, no, no.
Berne requires that the US protect foreign copyright holders if and only if equivalent works published in the US by US citizens would be protected.
If a work is intrinsically ineligible for copyright in the US then the US does not and will not honor any foreign laws that say otherwise.
Obviously, you haven't been paying any attention to anything posted above you.
NPG isn't right as far as -US- law is concerned. They ARE right as far as -UK- law is concerned.
Photographs of Public Domain works are not copyrightable under US law. This is a special exception to the general rule concerning copyright and photographs, and only applies to works in the Public Domain. In the specific case of Public Domain works, photographic reproduction of the works is treated as a mechanical process, and not a creative process (the way photographs are normally treated under US law).
There is no exception yet for photographic reproductions of Public Domain works under UK law, which is what this entire dispute is about: The conflict between the two laws, as it applies between NPG (UK) and Wikipedia (US).
As I stated in another post, the most fair and equitable solution for all sides is for Wikipedia to remove the high-res versions and replace them with the still high-quality but lower-res versions offered to them for 'Fair Use' by NPG.
Everybody wins, no courts or ambulance-chasers need to be involved.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
It's a bit unclear if he really "hacked" anything. The lawyers allege he "circumvented the technical measures", aka the "Zoomify" applet. However, "Zoomify" is intended to make it easier to view hi-res photos - not to prevent you from viewing them. From their site: "Zoomify makes high-quality images zoom-and-pan for fast, interactive viewing on the web". This application was not designed to protect copyright work: a fact to which its creators, no doubt, will readily attest.