A dispute over Wikipedia’s use of images from the Web site of a British art gallery is heating up as the online encyclopedia accuses the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) of violating its public service objective.
But the gallery claims it needs to recover the $1.6 million (£1m) cost of its digitization program, and says Wikipedia has distorted its position.
The NPG is now threatening legal action after 3,300 high-resolution images from its Web site were upload to Wikipedia by volunteer Derrick Coetzee.
Erik Moeller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, outlined the organization’s position in a blog post. He said the two sides should be “allies not adversaries” and that museums and other cultural institutions should not seek additional revenue at the expense of limiting public access to their material.
“It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopedia serves any public interest whatsoever,” he wrote.
Moeller referenced two German photographic archives that had donated 350,000 copyrighted images for use on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, other institutions in the U.S. and Britain have benefited from making material available for use, he said.
David Gerard, another Wikipedia volunteer, has blogged about the dispute, saying the NPG makes only $16,000 to $25,000 (£10-15,000) a year from Web licensing. The revenue, he said, is less than it earns “selling food in the cafe.”
But NPG insists its position has been mischaracterized, and released a statement denying many of the charges made by Wikipedia.
The gallery refuted claims that it has been “locking up and limiting access to educational materials”, saying instead that it has been a pioneer in making its material available.
For the last five years, the gallery has worked toward the goal of having half of its collection online this year, it said.
“We will be able to achieve this”¦as a result of self-generated income,” the gallery said in its statement, adding that while its Web licensing is limited, it earns far more from the reproduction of its images in books and magazines.
Indeed, the gallery made more than half a million dollars last year alone. But the current situation is putting its ability to self-finance its digitization process at risk, it said.
The NPG claims that Derrick Coetzee’s actions have breached British copyright laws, which protect copies of original material even when they themselves are out of copyright.
The NPG says it only sent a legal correspondence to Derrick Coetzee after the Wikimedia Foundation failed to answer requests to discuss the issue. However, contact has since been made and the gallery remains optimistic that a dialogue will take place, the NPG said.
An NPG spokeswoman said the two German archives mentioned in Erik Moeller’s blog had supplied only medium resolution images to Wikipedia, something the NPG was also willing to offer to Wikipedia.
The NPG described how Derrick Coetzee was able to obtain the high-resolution files from its site using a “Zoomify” feature, which works by permitting several high-resolution files to be viewed together. The gallery said Mr. Coetzee used special software to “de-scramble” the high-resolution tiles, allowing the entire portrait to be viewed in high resolution.
The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has supported the NPG’s position.
“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 digitization of works, and everyone will be the poorer,” the organization wrote in an email to its members.
However, Wikipedia volunteer David Gerard said the gallery is engaging in bureaucratic empire building.
“They honestly think the paintings belong to them rather than to us,” he wrote.
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