The NPG also claims to have contacted the Wikimedia Foundation over the issue, but to have been "ignored". The NPG asserts that the alleged infringement occurred in the UK, as its servers are located there: it also asserts that images hosted by Wikimedia "are clearly directed at (amongst others) UK users". We can confirm that every one of the images that you have copied is the product of a painstaking exercise on the part of the photographer that created the image in which significant time, skill, effort and artistry have been employed and that there can therefore be no doubt that under UK law all of those images are copyright works… According to the message, a formal letter of claim has been prepared and Coetzee will be sued unless all the images he uploaded are removed by July 20.įollowing the traditional view of British art galleries, the National Portrait Gallery claims that it has copyright over the digitized images that it publishes on its website: While the message published by Derrick Coetzee is not a formal letter of claim, it does note four specific grievances of the National Portrait Gallery, in varying degrees of precision: infringement of copyright, infringement of database right, unlawful circumvention of technical measures for restricting image use and breach of contract. citizen with legal action over Wikimedia images
In the message published by Derrick Coetzee, the NPG's lawyers themselves note that there is no English precedent that covers this particular situation. However the legal precedents for this approach date from many decades ago, and so cannot take account of the subsequent changes in British and international copyright law. On this basis, UK institutions that control public domain artifacts routinely claim copyright on reproductions. UK copyright law has traditionally been more tolerant of " sweat of the brow" copyright claims, on the basis that "what is worth copying is prima facie worth protecting". established that faithful reproductions of public domain images lack the originality required to generate a new copyright. In the United States-the home of both the Wikimedia Foundation and Derrick Coetzee-the 1999 case Bridgeman Art Library v. Since a 54:3 straw poll that followed Möller's statement, Wikimedia Commons has tagged such reproductions as public domain content (noting the possibility of restrictions imposed by "local laws"). The National Portrait Gallery holds thousands of portraits that have fallen into the public domain, but the organization claims copyright on photographs of those portraits.Īlmost four years ago, in his keynote at Wikimania 2005, Jimmy Wales already described receiving (and refusing) a request to remove "a number of images on your website which are portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London" (among them the famous Chandos portrait of Shakespeare and other 400-year-old paintings), and noted it was "a fairly routine thing for me to get complaints from museums who own works, who assume that because they own the physical object they can threaten Wikipedia to take these down." According to a July 2008 statement by Erik Möller, "WMF's position has always been that faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain"-and thus that copyright claims on such reproductions are illegitimate.
Coetzee posted the letter publicly, setting off discussions in the Wikimedia community and beyond about the legal, political, and ethical ramifications of the threat. In March of this year, Coetzee had uploaded over 3300 high-resolution images of public domain artworks held by the gallery to Wikimedia Commons. On July 10, Wikimedian Derrick Coetzee received an email message from Farrer & Co., lawyers acting for the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London, threatening legal action in the English courts.
By Ragesoss, Physchim62, Uncle G, HaeB, and Kaldari
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