National Portrait Gallery Robbed
Saturday July 18, 2009
I've been trying to decide for three days how to write about the Wikipedia editor who appropriated 3,014 high-resolution images from the National Portrait Gallery, London website and posted them to Wikimedia Commons. Bottom lines:
- A. If a website has copyrights notices, they are there for legal reasons.
B. If a website has specific pages of information about obtaining image permissions, they are there for legal reasons.
C. If you have to hack your way around software to download high-resolution image files, that should be a huge clue that you are flagrantly and willfully disregarding the legal reasons behind A and B.
D. It also should be apparent to the new repository of said hacked images that C is bad form, at best, and blatant theft at worst.
Comments
The whole thing has me frothing at the mouth in anger too. Not least because the NPG in London has long been a favorite of mine.
You seem to be taking sides here without looking at the actual facts and the legal situation. Have you ever heard of “Bridgeman v Corel”?
The factual content of your four assertions boils down to:
A. If a website claims copyright over some content, it must always be right.
Please google “copyfraud”.
B. If a website offers content for sale, this content cannot be public domain.
C. If a website hinders access to some content by software measures, that is a legal proof that it owns the copyright in that content.
(Note: Zoomify, the company making that software, denies that it is intended for access protection, it is just intended for convenient zooming of large images, as the name suggests.)
D. Because of C., Wikimedia must accept every copyright claim by such a website at face value without questioning it or forming their own legal opinion.
Read this comment about how NPG’s stranglehold on public domain paintings is hurting scholarly publishing.
The editor NPG is suing resides in US, and US has slightly more sane copyright laws: a reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain image is not copyrightable. I think this definition of copyright is more sensible, as with the modern digital techniques a good photo should have cost the museum maybe 10-50 pounds (setup the light and tripod, click the button, burn the DVD) and can be done by a skilled mateur with a good camera. If the museum indeed spent 1M, as they claim, they hired a wrong photographer. The purpose of the copyright law cannot be to reward a photographer who established a cozy relationship with a public museum.
@HaeB Of course I’ve heard of Bridgeman v. Corel. It applies to US copyright law, not UK. And, even so, it is still wide open to legal interpretation within the US.
If a website claims copyright and can prove it is legally entitled to do so, end of story. There is absolutely no question that the NPG can claim copyright in this case. This renders your next three points moot.
As for your last sentence, “…hurting scholarly publishing” is a weak argument. Anyone can ask for permission to use copyrighted material. In the absence of a PD, CC0 “No Rights Reserved” or CC Attribution license everyone SHOULD ask for permission. Too many people think that everything on the Internet is up for grabs when that is, quite simply, not always the case. Ask any writer, artist or musician you know if they enjoy paying their bills with an intangible sense of Bettering Humankind through content scrapers.
What really hurts scholarly publishing is the fear, justifiably held by many institutions and individuals, of property theft. The people arguing “Fair Use” for Wikipedia are doing more harm than good to alleviate those fears and advance their agenda.
Finally, since you mention taking sides and, judging by your email address, it seems you are firmly on one side already, I have a question for you: is this the sort of thing that Wikimedia Commons intends to do with its $300,000 Ford Foundation grant?
If the individual and Wikimedia’s servers are located in the US, why shouldn’t US law apply? Just because Orwell’s works are public domain in Australia doesn’t mean people in the US can copy them, since they’re still copyrighted there. Where did the act of copying occur? AFAICT it happened in the US, so US law applies, therefore the images are public domain.
The National Portrait Gallery is a publically funded British institution and as a public institution these images belong at the very least to the entire British public. I believe that the attitude of the National Portrait Gallery should only pursue those that aim to make a commercial profit from the reproduction of these images not for profit organizations such as Wikipedia should be exempt as they provide a means to bring these images to a wider public which must be part of the National Portrait Gallery’s charter. I do worry that the only winners in this debate will be the lawyers.
@James The source material (both physical and digital) is housed in the UK. I’m imagining that the original location must be a factor in any legal proceedings. It is with cultural property that isn’t digitized.
On a completely non-legal note, taking those images because they may (read: may) not fall under US copyright law protection flips a big middle finger at every other country on earth. Now, where was the harm in showing a modicum of respect for UK copyright law? If a UK citizens’ group or, better still, a UK-based Wikipedia editor wants to duke it out in UK court with the National Portrait Gallery over what’s PD and what isn’t, fabulous. For a US citizen to take images from a UK server, squirrel them away on US servers and cite US copyright law as protection is damned arrogant.
@S I feel as you do about who the winners of this debate will be.
Any discussion of this case must rest on the law as it applies and, since there is legitimate disagreement about what applies and how, the questions must be settled in court. I think it is very important not to prejudge the issues which, if recent changes in reproduction policies at the Met, V & A, and others are any indication, may well go in favor of Wikipedia. In any case, it does seem to me reasonable to say that policies of rights and reproductions created for 8 x 10s and color transparencies of images in the public domain should be reconsidered in the digital age. Speaking for myself, I sometimes have chosen areas of research based on whether I would be able to afford to publish reproductions of the work. So establishing clear legal guidelines will have impact on art historical scholarship as well.
The arguement that the place of origin of the thief should determine what laws they follow is false.
This is the arguement that many Chinese firms use for downloading and reproducing other artists from around the world.
As someone who has had an image stolen, I am not in agreement with this.
First of all, if the images are not used for profit is copyright permission required? However, why didn’t David Coetzee just ask for permission? That is discourteous, even if Wikipedia is a not-for-profit organization. The BBC article quotes David Gerard of Wikipedia as saying “They honestly think the paintings belong to them rather than to us” which completely ignores the cost the gallery puts into conservation, display, education, record-keeping, employment, and insurance to maintain works of art (and the building that houses them). It seems to me Wikipedia wins the Most Likely to be Arrogant award here.
As an artist and an art history teacher, I believe the copyright laws have become way to rigid and no longer protect the rights of the artists they originally intended to protect.
When dealing with art history, in most cases the person who copyrighted the material had nothing to do with the actual production of the work.
On the other hand, I have had my work stolen and did not appreciate it. I did not have the funds, time or lawyers to sue.
Copyright laws protect large institutions and not small artists which is the exact opposite of the original intention.