On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Tom Maaswinkeltom.maaswinkel@12wiki.eu wrote: [snip]
They only thing that I don't understand is that they claim that no-one from the wikimedia foundation ever responded to this. Is there any reason for this?
That isn't what they claimed.
They claimed: "Our client contacted the Wikimedia Foundation in April 2009 to request that the images be removed but the Wikimedia Foundation has refused to do so […]"
The initial complaint (OTRS #2009060110061897 for those with access) was made by a commercial partner (in the US) of the NPG, and was the typically legally uninformed nonsense that comes in often enough to have a boilerplate reply. They were given the standard "Wikimedia and it's servers are based in the US. Under US law such images are public domain per Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. Therefore no permission is required to use them." response. Presumably the commercial vendor got the NPG to make the legal threat under UK law because we adequately expressed that there was clearly no copyright concern under US law.
For clarity sake I should point out that the neither the complaint to Wikimedia, nor the response to the OTRS reply, included any offer of compromise.
In the past these kinds of arrangements have been negotiated. But escalating with legal force makes a sham of any good faith effort to negotiate, sadly.
As a practical matter, and a matter of principle, we can't accept that people can take exclusive ownership of the public domain simply by performing a little dance. Nor can we accept that UK law can be imposed on the Wikimedia Foundation or its US contributors, as under UK law our projects could likely not exist for a even day.