Wikipedia in trouble with National Portrait Gallery

Comments

• Wikipedia is one of the best humans inventions. Posted by Bob, UK
• The story omits the important fact that all of those 3000 paintings are in the public domain. It is only the reproduction photos that NPG can claim copyright on, and it can only do so in the UK (and even there it is not clear that the claim is valid). In the US, where both Wikipeda and the threatened Wikimedia user reside, faithful reproductions are not copyrighable by the Bridgeman v. Corel decision.
  
  By prohibiting the public to take photos of these centuries-old public domain paintings, while at the same time prohibiting use of their own reproduction photos, the NPG effectively usurps what (according to copyright law) should be public property.
  
  Yet the NPG - and its digitisation programme - is largely funded by the same public that they take these works away from. The licensing income that they are so concerned about is less than 2.3% of its overall budget, according to the NPG's 2007/2008 annual report. Posted by Torben, Germany
• NPG wrote to the user who uploaded those hi-res images, they have no intention and no reason for writing to WikiMedia Foundation (not WikiPedia) and in fact they didn't.
  
  Legal proceedings haven't yet been commenced. In case they do, it wouldn't be "against the online encyclopaedia" but against the user, since this kind of responsibility is personal in almost all modern countries.
  
  Since you quote the letter, one presumes you read it...
  
  Keeping on facts, the user lives in the USA where this "appropriation" is allowed.
  
  Very bad for NPG if they invested money upon rights which they cannot handle because in the public domain. Very worse if NPG was, and indeed it is, a public company (http://www.npg.org.uk/about/organisation.php) because if so they invested people's money to make business with PD works Posted by G, italy
• The NPG is a nationally funded art gallery (not a commercial company) with a public service remit, which is to allow the public (anyone and everyone) free access to their collection both physically and increasingly online.The 3000 images are a fraction of the 120,000 or so the NPG are in the process of digitising and making available to net users everywhere not just in Britain. The gallery does not charge netizens to see those images on its own site. Where it does charge is if a commercial user, say someone who wants to print posters or postcards or some other commercial product a fee to use their images. That income though small goes to looking after the paintings themselves, funding the digitisation of the remainder of the collection etc. The NPG offered the WMF a wikipedia only license of low res version of it images with a link from wikipedia to its own high resolution images for those who needed more detail. Despite allowing fair use criteria of copyrighted images for articles, WMF refused the NPG's compromise, and insists on using the NPG images under GDFL. At a guess the NPG is not so much concerned with the WMF use of its images, but the fact that commercial entities can now attempt to use the WMF versions of NPG images commercially without recompensing the NPG for the costs of digitising the images and removing a source of income. My own thoughts in this is that the WMF has shot itself in the foot, since the copying of the images, the NPG has removed the high res versions of its images from its website, the fact that is their attitude and behaviour has jeorpardised the sharing of the remainder of the collection, and the collections of other institutions Posted by KTo288, UK