Wikipedia in public content licensing spat with Britain’s National Portrait Gallery
Recently wikipedia volunteer Derrick Coetzee took images from the British National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and uploaded them to wikipedia in an effort to make them available to a broader audience. The gallery claims that the 3,300 hi-res images were recently digitzed at a cost of nearly £1m and the Gallery is now upset that the images are now available to the general public on Wikipedia.
NPG has further stated that it has been relying on licensing revenue of the works to help fund further digitisation and the present situation jeopardises its ability to fund projects from its own resources. The gallery says that while it only makes a limited revenue from web licensing, it earns far more from the reproduction of its images in books and magazines - £339,000 in the last year.
Erik Moeller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation which runs the online encyclopaedia recently commented in a blog post “most observers would think the two sides should be “allies not adversaries” and that museums and other cultural institutions should not pursue extra revenue at the expense of limiting public access to their material.” He continues “It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopaedia serves any public interest whatsoever.”
He points out that two German photographic archives donated 350,000 copyrighted images for use on Wikipedia, and other institutions in the United States and the UK have seen benefits in making material available for use.
Web: Portraits uploaded to Wikipedia - Letter from NPR threatening litigation - Blog entry from Erik Moeller
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