QUOTE(dcoetzee @ Mon 13th July 2009, 5:10pm)
...these images were in fact obtained from the NPG website, not their CD of digital works, which I don't own and most likely does not contain high-resolution images at all. NPG removed the high-resolution images from their website back in April.
I'm just catching up on this, really, but does anyone know if the NPG was more concerned/upset about the high resolution versions (still) being available via WP, or was it the failure of WP to include links to the NPG site from actual article pages?
The example used by the NPG's Assistant Picture Library Manager, Matthew Bailey, in the e-mail reproduced on
this page was
Mary Wollstonecraft (T-H-L-K-D), where (as you can see) there's no mention of the NPG beneath that image. The NPG is, however, mentioned (but not linked to directly) elsewhere on that page, in the caption beneath the image of
William Northcote, with no apparent reason for the inconsistency other than the fact that Wikipedia tends to be inconsistent about such things.
I would think that if I was the National Portrait Gallery, I would at least want links directly to my (NPG's) website from somewhere on the article pages if people on WP insisted on using digital images that I had contracted to be created. If I had that, I probably wouldn't mind the high resolutions. (Having the links not be tagged as "nofollow" would be nice too, of course.) The idea that's it's sufficient to have such links only on the "image pages" is, to say the least, rather cheeky on WP's part.