Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
wikipedia-l-request@Wikimedia.org wrote:
From: "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com Subject: [Wikipedia-l] [bhorrocks@npg.org.uk: National Portrait Gallery images on Wikipedia website]
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.
I would be curious to know what policy these galleries apply with regard to photography by individual visitors to the gallery.
I think too that there is a question of burden of proof involved. Even if their principle legal premise is correct they need to prove that our picture was taken from their website, rather than us needing to prove that it was from somewhere else. Also if their premise is correct that there is a copyright in these reproduction, an individual who has taken his own photograph of a picture would not lose his own copyright on the basis that he had violated a no-photography rule.
Another observation that I would make is that any copyrights to these reproductions must be determined separately. Without that, how can we know the copyright date of a specific photograph? Without the copyright date, how can we know when the copyright expires? What is meant by publishing? If the same photograph was used to produce a postcard in 1930 the copyright on that would certainly have expired. Whose courts have jurisdiction?
Naturally, taking a stand on this requires more research than these off the cuff remarks. Still I think that it is inevitable that as the putative copyright holders see their revenue streams threatened they will take action to protect those streams. Sooner or later there will be a legal confrontation; what we need to know is which actions are worth defending.
Ec