On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Gregory Maxwell<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Tom
Maaswinkel<tom.maaswinkel(a)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.