From the BBC article

“The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has backed the National Portrait Gallery’s stance.

“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 then for free, they will cease to invest in the digitisation of works, and everyone will be the poorer,” it wrote in an email to its members.”

Surely the investment in digitisation by publicly funded institutions is not optional. Whether derivative works are or are not protected is irrelevant unless we are talking about private companies – and even then there are plenty of companies whose business models revolve around the republishing of out of Copyright material.

We have a big problem if this sort of thinking spreads to public institutions.

The NPG have acted as nice as is possible, and wanted to enter dialogue with the WMF over the images, the WMF could host low resolution images, with the correct copyright notices, linked to the high resolution on the WMF website. The WMF firmly reject this however because of the copyright status, the WMF will only be happy if they can have the images themselves, the high resolution ones, under a PD licence, anything else just isn’t cricket!

Lets face it though, how many blogs out there would *need* to post a high-res image? How many websites would happily set up the img tag, linked to a file that is over 1mb in size, when studies suggest that if a website doesn’t load in 3-5 seconds, or maybe 8, the person doesn’t visit the website?

All the high res images are taken down now, so no one can enjoy them, I really don’t expect them to be put back up.

■does the exposure on Wikimedia increase exposure? – No, why go to the NPG site when you can find all the images on wikipedia instead, along with details on the person, and a huge notice at the bottom accusing the NPG (incorrectly) of copyfraud?

■does exposure of hi-res pictures stop people from buying them – It stops people licencing them, and because of the licence that the WMF has applied to them (which *is* copyfraud) people who view them on Wikipedia will be lead to believe copyright does not apply (when, it does, the WMF try to use a US ruling to justify their actions when the US ruling does not apply, and UK copyright experts say would not have passed in the UK anyhow)

■does the exposure of the images increase click-through to the NPG website (and hence, assuming at least some kind of connection between traffic and physical visits) – Interesting question. Not sure they would have to give the information of an FOI request though due to data protection laws.

■does the threat of legal action make NPG look good? – A better question, does the actions of the WMF in blatently ignoring UK copyright, accusing a British museum of copyfraud and threatening “bad publicity” make the WMF look good? Depends on which side of the fence you sit, supporters of the WMF will say the NPG is at fault, supporters of the NPG will say the WMF is at fault, legal experts say its a simple case of copyright theft, I’m going to do with the copyright experts on this one.

Were the images on Wikimedia actually attributed to the NPG? Does Wikimedia re-write the rights around the images they have reconstructed? Check Jim’s comment on http://www.sydneyobservatory.com.au/blog/?p=1975 If someone wanted to purchase a high res version, print or license, would they know who to ask?

I should really post this to the MCG list, as I think these discussions are better held centrally, but I’m rushing out the door…

As to Dan’s question of whether there were links to NPG, the answer is yes, links to the relevant pages at the NPG website were included from when all these images were first uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

On “circumvention of Zoomify”, I don’t think that’s much of an issue. First of all, Zoomify themselves say very clearly that it’s not a security system, it’s an image viewing system. Coetzee and the others who have used the same method to reconstruct hi-res images from Zoomify tiles are not really circumventing it. If the images are public domain, then it’s legal to capture any given tile (after all, it’s just a screengrab copy of a digital copy of a photograph of a PD painting), legal to collect the tiles for one image and stitch them together (because they’re all PD, so you can do whatever you want with them), and legal to do all that automatically with a script. And what’s more, because of the way image compression works, the end result will actually be a different file than the original that’s underneath Zoomify. So Zoomify isn’t being circumvented, it’s being used to provide hi-res public domain images that happen to be part of a larger whole that can be pieced together.

The breach of contract bit is slightly more compelling, but only just.

The real claim that muddies the waters is database right, which I don’t know much about but which seems like simply an unfortunate bit of law.

I suggested a similar value measuring exercise a while ago on the MCG list:

“What would be fantastic (if unlikely) would be if a museum or gallery agreed to take part in a quantitative study: take one selection of images and hide them away behind watermarking, DRM and thumbnails; take another and make these widely and hugely available via Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, etc. Offer both sets for purchase in hi-res, then sit back and measure over a period of time. Common sense says that people will steal all the small ones and not bother buying: increasing bodies of evidence show the opposite is actually true.”

I’d love to see such a study…

Perhaps we could persuade someone to expose such data, perhaps finding some way to pay for any significant loss to be insured against, and see what happens…..

Of course, actual metrics might not be really desirable to all. Like the music industry, perhaps there is going to be a significant rear-guard action devoted to protecting existing business models for as long as possible.

There are a lot of vested interests here it seems to me – not necessarily just those directly involved in the actual court case….

Good post BTW – useful roundup of some of the issues and some useful comments besides.

Paul