Picture still murky in Wikipedia art gallery row
Wikipedia and the British National Portrait Gallery are continuing to do battle over copyright issues with paintings which have entered the public domain. The row has intensified after confusion over the costs the gallery incurred in digitizing the images.
The dispute began when a Wikipedia administrator downloaded 3,300 images from the gallery’s Web site and uploaded them to relevant Wikipedia pages. In most cases the images weren’t used to in relation to the painting or artists themselves, but as a way to provide an image for the page about the historical figure who is the subject of the portrait.
The gallery is in the midst of a project to digitize the entire archive. The paintings themselves are long out of coypright. However, the gallery maintains that copies of the images, including those which it has digitized and added to its site, come under fresh copyright periods.
The agency says that it would have been prepared to share the medium-resolution images which appear on its site, in a similar fashion to those which have been donated by some other major galleries in Europe.
However, the administrator, Derrick Coetzee, took advantage of the zoom function on the gallery’s Web site which allows users to look at sections of a painting in closer detail. He used automated software to gather together all these sections and stitch them together to produce a high-resolution image.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, says it’s open to making an agreement but insists that because the gallery controls physical access to the paintings, it can’t also enforce copyright over copies of the images as doing so undermines the principal of them being in the public domain.
Part of the gallery’s argument is that it has spent £1 million (approximately US$1.65 million) on the digitization process and that Coetzee’s actions make it much more difficult for it to make back this cash by licensing images, for example to book publishers.
There have been claims today that the gallery is grossly exaggerating this figure. These come from a reply the gallery made to a request under freedom of information laws in which it stated the costs of putting the images online as £39,000 (around US$65,000). However, the request clearly asks for the total amount “Not including digitization costs.”
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July 20th, 2009
Thank you for describing how Coetzee got the images. So many sites are getting it wrong and saying he “hacked in” or that he “descrambled” the photos.
(I’m pretty sure he wrote the software to extract the photos, too.)