Alas, that era predates high-quality color printing. Art galleries are likely to be pretty zealous about protecting their sources of revenue, not just the reproduction rights, but also as encouragement for visitors to come and see the pictures in person, rather than getting their fill online.
I wonder if they could be convinced to GFDL thumbnails, as a sort of quasi-advertising. One might also exploit a little national chauvinism, pointing out that the PD status of most US government images is causing Wikipedia's historical imagery to be dominated by US pictures; for instance, a bunch of Royal Navy ship pictures come from US archives, can't imagine the Brits being particularly proud about that. :-)
Stan
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
The simple solution is that we need to find as many nicely printed art books from the PD era, and do some mass scanning and uploading, documenting carefully the sources.
--Jimbo
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 04:41:09AM +0000, wikipedia-l-request@Wikimedia.org wrote:
Message: 8 Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 21:38:28 -0700 From: "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com Subject: [Wikipedia-l] [bhorrocks@npg.org.uk: National Portrait Gallery images on Wikipedia website] To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org, wikien-l@wikimedia.org Message-ID: 20040804043828.GM23467@wikia.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
It would please me greatly to be able to respond that their claims are preposterous. Shall we research this carefully?
I don't know about UK law, but the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia (with the shared legal tradition I believe the copyright laws are similar) seems to believe that they own the rights to any photographs of the artworks they own, even if the artworks themselves are in the public domain. You will note the copyright notice on this Australian website:
http://www.artistsfootsteps.com/html/Artists_mccubbin.htm
This is despite the fact that McCubbin died in 1917.
I have been meaning to get around to making further enquiries into this in the Australian context, but haven't got around to it. Given this enquiry, it just got moved up my priority list.
--
Robert Merkel robert.merkel@benambra.org http://benambra.orgThis is a non-story. Pakistan is our ally in the war against terrorism. They're the good guys. Nuclear weapons in the hands of the good guys are NOT WMD's. Now if it were learned that Saddam had access to designs for constructing paper airplanes, THAT would be front page news. --Beth, poster at http://atrios.blogspot.com, 31/1/2003, in response to low-prominence media reports of an Israeli national arrested for selling US nuclear technology to Pakistan.
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