On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>
wrote:
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 12:21 AM, Jimmy Wales
<jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
Speaking only for myself, not the Board, and
speaking only in my
traditional capacity, I can say that I very strongly support keeping
these images. Public domain paintings are public domain. This is not
about borderline cases around exact dates. This is OLD stuff.
I call on the National Portrait Gallery to release these images under a
free license. Barring that, I propose that we ignore any illegitimate
and unjust false claims to copyright in these things, unless and until
they are willing to take us to court.
Mike Godwin and the Wikimedia Foundation have the final say, of course,
and I respect that. But I hope we encourage courage in this area.
Yes! Now if the Foundation could set up a page clarifying the official
position on this, we could just point to it in the future.
Magnus
Maybe I'm being naive, but how much such a decision would be UK-specific?
Particularly in the sense that the images are published in the US? Italy has
a similar problem, although we have the complication that the Law assigns a
sort of copyright to the museum, even if the work of art is photographed by
a random visitor. The body governing the museums in Florence sent us a take
down notice from it.wikipedia a few years ago, and probably some images are
still on commons (but cannot be used on it.wp).
Regarding the NPG images, I think the main problem would be that a UK reuser
would infringe the NPG copyright, while she reads that those images are PD;
the NPG may decide that suing Wikipedia is not a great idea, but suing some
British student that puts up his own website may be; transiting through the
US to remove copyright appears to me as a kind of money laundering...
Cruccone