New Developments In NPG/Wikipedia Lawsuit Threat 345
Raul654 writes "Last week, it was reported that the UK's National Portrait Gallery had threatened a lawsuit against an American Wikipedian for uploading pictures from the NPG's website to Wikipedia. The uploaded pictures are clearly in the public domain in the United States. (In the US, copies of public domain works are also in the public domain. UK law on the matter is unclear.) Since then, there have been several developments: EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann has taken on the case pro-bono; Eric Moeller, Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director, has responded to the NPG's allegations in a post on the WMF blog; and the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has weighed in on the dispute in favor of the NPG."
difficult... (Score:1, Funny)
This is a difficult one, I think, because it's harder to conceive of one of the parties as "evil" in the way that you can when the RIAA is suing dead people and those who have never used a computer. I have sympathies for the NPG - not least because they use the high-quality scans as a form of revenue which enables them to keep a really fantastic gallery open and free to all. Whilst what Wikipedia have done is almost certainly legal in the US, they are distributing it in the UK (where we might say it is presumtively prohibited). Of course, all this could have been sorted if we just had a root and branch overview of copyright throughout the world, but the Berne convention will probably prevent that...
And don't forget that the NPG hasn't taken to this in an "evil" way, they did offer to provide lower resolution pictures and haven't been preditory
Who would guess (Score:3, Funny)
the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has weighed in on the dispute in favor of the NPG.
There's a shocker. These people are just as bad as the *AA here in the U.S. Their about us [bapla.org.uk] page just screams "we make money of every dirty copyright trick we can think of and pretend to do it for you, the artist, the photographer, the little guy". It's all such a sham.
Check out their site, I was going to quote some of it but you can't even right click the page without their stupid JavaScript alerting you that their site is their content, blah, blah. Hello, 1996 called they want their cheap tricks back. Obviously this stuff is easy to defeat but it's still ridiculous that they even do it at all.
I hope this suit goes all the way to the new Supreme Court [judiciary.gov.uk] England is setting up and that these idiots get a total smackdown. Hey, a guy can dream a little right?
Re:Pictures versus digital photos... (Score:0, Funny)
That wouldn't work anyway. The photocopier is borked because someone melted a transparency in it.
And the glass is cracked, where someone tried to photocopy their ass at the Christmas party.
And it's out of toner.