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Wikipedia Threatened for Putting National Portrait Gallery Pictures Online

By Carolyn Elefant

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth a lawsuit? Wikipedia administrator Derrick Coetzee is about to find out. As reported by paidContent, the National Portrait Gallery in London sent Coetzee a legal notice demanding that he remove more than 3,000 photographs from Wikipedia that Coetzee had downloaded from the Gallery's database. Prior to sending a legal notice, the Gallery had asked Wikipedia to take down the photos, without success. Now, Coetzee is being represented by Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The dispute raises several interesting legal questions. As the paidContent post describes: Whilst the creators of the portraits themselves (and, therefore, the owners of their copyright) are long deceased, the case concerns the gallery?s photographs of the paintings, which it argues have separate and active copyright. One might argue that's a disingenuous logic - though the original paintings are, to all intents, now in the public domain, by virtue of hanging in a gallery, the government-funded gallery?s claim works against the notion that they should equally be in the public domain in the digital world. It?s that which Coetzee and von Lohmann are likely to argue. To make the case even more...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on July 16, 2009 (boomark / email).