Fight for digital rights

The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) has sent a lawyer’s letter to a Wikipedia volunteer, claiming that 3,000 of its high-resolution images were “appropriated” from its website and published on Wikipedia without permission, in breach of English copyright law. The letter was issued when the US-based Wikimedia Foundation failed to respond to requests by NPG to discuss the matter: in the US, photos of public domain paintings do not carry copyright. NPG makes more than 60,000 low-resolution digital images available on its website, and is happy for these to be used on the Wikipedia site. But the potential loss of licensing income from the high-res files threatens its ability to invest further in its digitisation programme, which has cost around £1m over the past five years.
Intellectual property attorneys Mathys and Squire will examine issues of online copyright legislation in the next edition of AP.