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Originally Posted by murraypaul
Do you have an example case for that?
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Sure. The one that springs to mind was the claim brought by the National Portrait Gallery in London against Derrick Coetzee, for making available on "Wikimedia Commons" some 3000 high-resolution photographs of the Gallery's collection.
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In July 2009, lawyers representing the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) sent a demand letter threatening possible legal action for alleged copyright infringement, to an editor-user of the free content multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The letter claims that Wikipedia editor Derrick Coetzee obtained more than 3,000 high-resolution images from the British National Portrait Gallery in March 2009 and posted them on Wikimedia Commons.[1][2][3]
The NPG letter stated the claim that while the painted portraits may be old (and have thus fallen into the public domain), the high-quality photographic reproductions are recent works, and qualify as copyrighted works due to the amount of work it took to digitize and restore them,[2][4][5] that the action of uploading the images infringed on both the NPG's database rights and copyrights,[3][4][6][7] and that the images were obtained through the circumvention of technical measures used to prevent downloading of the prints.[8] The NPG also stated that the public availability of the images would affect revenue acquired from licensing the images to third parties, revenue also used to fund the project of digitizing their collection,[7] an effort that the NPG claims cost the organization over one million pounds.[1] The NPG had requested a response by July 20, 2009 from Coetzee, and also requested that the images be removed from the site, but noted that the NPG was not considering any legal action against the Wikimedia Foundation.[2][3] The NPG announced that Mr. Coetzee had responded via his legal representative by the requested deadline.[4][9] Coetzee's legal representation is provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[2][10]
Coetzee publicly posted a copy of the legal letter from the NPG, indicating that he desired to "enable public discourse on the issue".[1] On July 17, 2009, NPG gallery spokesperson, Eleanor Macnair, stated that “contact has now been made” with the Wikimedia Foundation and “we remain hopeful that a dialogue will be possible.”[2] The NPG has stated that it would be willing to permit Wikipedia to use low-resolution images, and that it hoped to avoid taking any further legal action.[1] The NPG had previously attempted to contact the Wikimedia Foundation in April 2009 regarding this issue, but did not receive an immediate response.[1]
The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) has expressed support for the gallery.[5]
In early 2010, an NPG spokesperson reported to heise Open, a division of German publishing house Heinz Heise, "We had a constructive discussion in December and are now considering how best to come to an agreement."[11]
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Full article
here.