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.