Too big for their own boots?
I’ve just become aware of a right kerfuffle between Britain’s National Portrait Gallery and the Wikipedia Foundation, all because of a smart young thing who hijacked a lot of high-quality images from the NPG site and “published” them on Wikipedia. I make no apologies for taking the side of a cultural institution in protecting its property against the depredations of an arrogant mob who assert that if it’s on the Web, it’s free - no matter that they had to do some serious hacking to extract the images from the NPG’s server.
Update (19 August)
There are a couple of good discussions on this complicated issue, at TechnoLlama and LawClanger.
August 19th, 2009 at 1:47 am
You seem to be misinformed. The images are in the public domain (or maybe not in the UK, but that’s an unsettled legal issue), and there was no serious hacking involved. The “hacking” was both simple and legal, the copyright claims over the images illegitimate.
Wikipedians most certainly do not take the attitude that if it’s on the web it’s free. We take copyright very seriously, and we try very hard to respect legitimate copyright claims and ensure that the images we use are public domain or released under free licenses (or, in certain limited circumstances, are well-justified by fair use). It’s just that we don’t have much tolerance for cultural institutions who try to drag public domain works–our common cultural heritage–back under tight copyright control.
Fortunately (for everyone who cares about cultural heritage more than revenue) most cultural institutions are beginning to accept the difference between controlling the physical copy of something and controlling a copyright over it.
August 19th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Thanks for the reply.
I believe that Wikipedia asks its volunteers to respect the laws in the country where the content originates, and this was clearly not done in this case. Instead, the site was hacked (as you confirm) and rather than the low-res images that were offered, a set of reproduction-quality images was published.
This bespeaks an arrogance (if not an inconsistency) on the part of Wikipedia.
August 20th, 2009 at 6:45 am
I’m an active Wikipedian myself, and I certainly do not want to break copyright laws when they are legitimate. This, however, is unreasonable.
The very idea that anyone, even cultural institutions, should be allowed to hijack public domain works for something as banal as paying for their digitalization is absurd. Adjusting the price of a copy of something one has never owned the rights to based on the the resolution of that copy is wholly gratuitous. I also find it somewhat demeaning to imply that the general public should always make do with second-rate material.
August 20th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Thanks for the response.
What’s being lost in all the discussion about laws and precedent is the concept of common decency. The NPG is an organisation that owns (or has on long term loan) artworks, upon which it depends for a part of its income.
Knowing this, a person circumvents the NPG’s procedures through various means and publishes this in another system (with the approval of the operators of that system), thereby depriving the NPG of some of its much needed revenue.
That is just not good manners.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
But “good manners” is not exactly what museums are displaying by limiting the the public’s access to their collections. The only thing they own is the physical substance of thsoe artworks, the canvas, frame and paint. They have abolutely no say as to how those works of art (in an immaterial sense) are to be used by the general public, and no amount of litigation will change that. If they think otherwise, they need to be brusquely reminded of who they’re actually supposed to work for.
What has happened here is the NPG, just like museums all over the world, taking undue advantage of copyright legislation that was never intended to be used in this manner. It’s basically a loophole in the law in certain jurisdictions which happens to grant copyright protection to photography no matter whether it’s displays any kind of originality or not. That the end result is basically identical to scanning is for some odd reason seen as irrelevant.
As for NPG’s potential loss of income due to this debacle (if it’s actually true in the first place) is of course unfortunate, but should have been expected. The “but we want to make money out of this”-defence is not the a valid moral nor judicial excuse to threaten individuals like Derek Coatzee or organizations dedicated to disseminating free knowledge to the people with lawsuits. The financing of digitalization of public domain art should be arranged with public funds, rather than with unwholesome and illegitimate copyright claims.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I don’t agree that they are limiting the public’s access to their collections. I was able to go to their site, search for a portrait of Horatio Nelson and display it on my computer screen in sufficient detail to enjoy it.
And I would argue that they (and any private collectors) have an absolute right to say how those works of art are to be used by the general public. And if the general public disagrees, they have the ability to object.
What the public don’t have is the right to do what they choose with the gallery’s property.
I think the end result of this will be that collecting institutions will be much more careful about what they expose on the Web, and we’ll all suffer.
August 20th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Greedy copyright appropriation aside, the NPG appears to have forgotten that it is not some private venture but the property of the people. As such they should not be in the business of deciding where, when and why anyone would want to appreciate a copy of a public domain artworks, artworks which however much they insist is and never will be anything but their *physical* property. That you personally are fine with how they limit supply to art does not mean that everyone else have to be content with it.
What the NPG is engaging here is a type of subtle blackmail. Instead of trying to be more open and take advantage of this incident to insist that governements start forking up the money for digitalization they attempt suck funds from individuals. Copyright law does not exist to fund museums, but to promote creativity and make a living for artists, and this has absolutely nothing to do with that.
August 20th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I think both of us have said as much as our readership can bear.
This conversation has ended.
October 17th, 2009 at 11:12 am
An essay published in the November 2005 issue of DLib, by Kenneth Hamma, the Executive Director for Digital Policy of the J. Paul Getty Trust (which operates the Getty Museum in California), “Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility,” may be of some help to you here, especially given that it was written by a representative of the one the great world museums. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/hamma/11hamma.html
October 20th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Thanks for the link, but I remain unconvinced. Mr Hamma says that placing reproductions in the public domain “would likely cause no harm to the finances or reputation of any collecting institution”. My point is that the Gallery did put reproductions in the public domain - that is, images on a web page - but clearly did not do so for reproduction-quality images for which they charged substantial fees.
I stand by my claims that the Wikipedia clique acted in a high-handed way to appropriate what was not theirs.