Legal row over National Portrait Gallery images placed on Wikipedia
The National Portrait Gallery has threatened legal proceedings for breach of copyright against a man who downloaded thousands of high-resolution images from its website, and placed them in an archive of free-to-use images on Wikipedia.
There has been no formal response from the internet encyclopedia but Derrick Coetzee, who downloaded the images, promptly uploaded the letter from the London lawyers Farrar and Co, "to enable public discourse on the issue". He said he was taking legal advice .
Photographs of works of art are protected by copyright in the UK, but not in the US, where Coetzee lives. All the creators of the original images are long since dead, but the photographs were only taken for the NPG as part of a £1m digitisation project in the last couple of years.
The gallery stressed today that they hoped to avoid taking any further legal action, and said they were not considering suing Wikipedia. It said it would be happy for the online site to use low-resolution images but was "very concerned" about loss of revenue from copyright fees for the high-resolution versions, which form a significant part of its income.The projected gross revenue from fees in 2008/9 was over more than £339,000.
The images include paintings, drawings and photographs. There are depictions of of politicians, such as George Canning, whose 119-day tenure as prime minister is the shortest on record; paintings, such as that of a charming portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds' picture of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire – subject of a hit biography and film – as a child; and other images of writers and artists including the famously romantic portraits of Byron, and a portrait picture of the pioneering Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron by her friend the artist GF Watts...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
There has been no formal response from the internet encyclopedia but Derrick Coetzee, who downloaded the images, promptly uploaded the letter from the London lawyers Farrar and Co, "to enable public discourse on the issue". He said he was taking legal advice .
Photographs of works of art are protected by copyright in the UK, but not in the US, where Coetzee lives. All the creators of the original images are long since dead, but the photographs were only taken for the NPG as part of a £1m digitisation project in the last couple of years.
The gallery stressed today that they hoped to avoid taking any further legal action, and said they were not considering suing Wikipedia. It said it would be happy for the online site to use low-resolution images but was "very concerned" about loss of revenue from copyright fees for the high-resolution versions, which form a significant part of its income.The projected gross revenue from fees in 2008/9 was over more than £339,000.
The images include paintings, drawings and photographs. There are depictions of of politicians, such as George Canning, whose 119-day tenure as prime minister is the shortest on record; paintings, such as that of a charming portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds' picture of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire – subject of a hit biography and film – as a child; and other images of writers and artists including the famously romantic portraits of Byron, and a portrait picture of the pioneering Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron by her friend the artist GF Watts...