QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Sat 11th July 2009, 3:36am)
The National Portrait Gallery is a substantial institution with strong equities and much motivation to press this issue. The correspondence seems to me well reasoned, thought out and very detailed. In itself, and taking into account the underlying work and investigation it represents, it already amounts to substantial commitment of legal resources. It is the kind of letter that indicates that the aggrieved party has his ducks in row and could work up pleading in short order. Next comes a round of discovery to WMF and ISP etc needed to name and serve the pseudonym (presumably WMF would also be named.) This does not seem to me to be an idle threat.
It might be worth the fight to WMF, represented by EFF or the like, and is certainly worth while for NPG. I doubt that the pseudonym will feel so glad about the experience by the time it's over.
But the WMF is in the US. Is there such a thing as international civil courts? (I don't think so.) Unless the threatened editor lives in the UK, both he and the WMF would seem to be beyond the NPG's reach.
QUOTE(TungstenCarbide @ Sat 11th July 2009, 3:40am)
Nah, no moral justification. They might be legally entitled to bring a test case, but under no stretch of the imagination are they morally entitled. The copyrights on those paintings are expired. Nobody looks at them to admire the photographer's skill, and there is no moral justification for making money off the work of some guy who died 300 years ago. The skillful photographer copier angle is a weak technicality that doesn't follow the spirit of copyright law.
That's what Bridgeman is about in the US. The circumstances of Bridgeman have never been litigated in the UK. It is interesting that the letter cites the supposed creative input and skill by the photographer (to exactly reproduce a work of art?) as a way to pre-empt a Bridgeman-like article.
It would be lovely if this were litigated in the UK and for the NPG to lose just like Bridgeman did. Copyright protects artistic expression for a limited period of time in order to encourage and monetize such expressions. Copyright was never meant to be permanent.
QUOTE(dtobias @ Sat 11th July 2009, 4:07am)
Legally, the gallery might be right, at least in the U.K. (though not in the U.S., where the servers and apparently the individual Wikipedian are). Morally, however, I have to side with the "free culture" crowd and oppose efforts by institutions to gain proprietary rights over things whose copyrights are nonexistent or long expired, simply based on their possession of the physical objects and their limiting the ability of outsiders to make photographs or copies of them.
Hear, hear!
QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sat 11th July 2009, 10:10am)
QUOTE(TungstenCarbide @ Sat 11th July 2009, 7:09am)
It also takes skill and expensive equipment to machine a fine bearing race. That doesn't mean the machinist owns a copyright on it. Why should it be so for a photograph of a masterpiece? 'Creativity' is inherent in copyright law.
Where the hell is NYB when we need him.
No but the company that employs that person owns the copyright.
On the supposedly complex legal situation, the letter supposedly from Farrers refers to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
http://www.england-legislation.hmso.gov.uk...880048_en_2#pt1which says
QUOTE
Copyright is a property right which subsists in accordance with this Part in the following descriptions of work—
(a) original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works,
[...]
where "artistic work†means—
(a) a graphic work, photograph, sculpture or collage, irrespective of artistic quality,"
But is a photographic reproduction of a painting "original"? This is the basis for Bridgeman v Corel in the US, and the museum lost. There is no question that in the US, such photographs, no matter how skillfully taken, are not protected. A similar case has not been litigated in the UK, as the letter points out, so the museum is in fact taking some risk here as well.