National Portrait Gallery receives support from BAPLA in its legal fight against Wikipedia
The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has weigh in in a tense showdown between the National Portrait Gallery and Wikipedia after thousands of NPG images were uploaded on the social encyclopedia
In March 2009, more than 3000 high-resolution files were taken from the National Portrait Gallery website and published on Wikipedia without the gallery's permission. In a statement, the National Portrait Gallery says that it ‘is very concerned that potential loss of licensing income from the high-resolution files threatens its ability to reinvest in its digitisation programme and so make further images available. It is one of the Gallery's primary purposes to make as much of the Collection available as possible for the public to view.'
Over the past five years, the National Portrait Gallery has spent £1m to digitize its collection of images, with 60,000 already available online in low-resolution.
‘Wikipedia has not responded to our requests to discuss the issue and so the National Portrait Gallery has been obliged to issue a lawyer's letter,' says the National Portrait Gallery. ‘The Gallery remains willing to enter into a dialogue with Wikipedia.'
BAPLA has thrown its support behind the National Portrait Gallery, with Simon Cliffe, its executive director, adding that the issue was a very important one for the organisation's members. ‘We understand that other people who have had similar experiences with Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons have been told that they regard all images of out of copyright material as public domain, and dispute there is any copyright in a copy of an original work,' he says. ‘This is contrary to UK law. The copying of original works for commercial use requires skill and expertise and has a financial cost to the producer. The 1988 CDPA recognises this.'
He continues: ‘If owners of out of copyright material are not going to have the derivative works they have created protected, which will result in anyone being able to use them for free, they will cease to invest in the digitisation of works, and everyone will be the poorer. Protection of derivative works is not about restriction of access to those works, it is simply about protecting the works from commercial exploitation by those who have not invested in the creation of the new work. As we can see from the NPG case, they do not want to restrict access to the public, but to assert the protection the law provides for their commercial interests. In this way they can raise more funds to invest in making even more material available.'
Jay Walsh, head of communications for the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, issued a statement on 14 July calling the National Portrait Gallery's action unfortunate. ‘The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally,' he says. ‘To that end, we have very productive working relationships with a number of galleries, archives, museums and libraries around the world, who join with us to make their educational materials available to the public.
‘The Wikimedia Foundation does not control user behavior, nor have we reviewed every action taken by that user. Nonetheless, it is our general understanding that the user in question has behaved in accordance with our mission, with the general goal of making public domain materials available via our Wikimedia Commons project, and in accordance with applicable law.'
It is not the first time that the National Portrait Gallery and Wikipedia have been at odds. Over the past few years, Wikipedia users have banned several National Portrait Gallery employees from making edits on the social encyclopedia. These employees, identified by their IP addresses, used to remove images from Wikipedia, replacing them with copyright disclaimers.
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