UK's National Portrait Gallery Threatens To Sue Wikipedia User

Sounds like a clear cut 'fair use' to me, no?

The end user is using for academic purposes, not making any money and not losing any money (if any marketing their goods)... I can't see any judge looking favourably on such a claim.

Personally, I'd chuck their letters in the bin till I got something

Has there been any comparable precedent set in the UK yet? Because it sounds liek shit to me.


Mens rea?

"Jurisdiction of UK Courts

Whilst we know that you are based in the United States of America, your activities nevertheless give rise to claims under UK law because:

1. The servers on which our client’s website is hosted are based in the UK and therefore, technically, your unlawful downloading (which give rise to some of the copyright, database right and breach of contract claims described herein) took place in the UK; and

2. The pages of the Wikipedia website on which you have reproduced our client’s images are clearly directed at (amongst others) UK users of the website."


So, they are confident they can prove the person downloaded files themselves AND did it with the intent to breach copyright AT THE TIME of downloading? A no comment defence would kill that angle alone! So, no it doesn't sound like clear cut UK jurisdiction.

The notice sounds to me like the kind of boilerplate trash the companies/firms employed to police companies 'intellectual property' feel obliged to fire at anything that moves. We used to just ignore them.

If it starts to look like more than 'fire at anything that moves', and gets serious:

Go to the US equivalent of the Law Society homepage and do a search for 'copyright & trademark' lawyers and find some near you, get your free consultations with a few and they'll let you know where you stand.

If they really do have a viable case (and I doubt it), you find a find a firm who are willing to kick the NPG in the nuts no bothers.

What the fuck has the world come to when people are being sued by a public museum for exhibiting their exhibits!?

Why is the National Gallery (nominally a publically owned UK institution) subsidising Wikipedia (nominally a privately owned US enterprise)?

Seeing intellectual property as commonly owned is fine, but advocating the transfer of publically owned images to the private sector is hardly advancing that agenda.

You are taking the piss surely?

If it is fair use, it is fair use.

Tsk! Bloody ambulance chasers.

Copyright is just a way the capitalist class uses to enslave culture and control the creativity of the proletarian class. We should abolish copyright in its entirety, together with patents and trade marks.

Pirates of the Westminster City,

Wikipedia is, for all its open source contribution, is not copylefted: all of the content belongs to Wikipedia. Feel free to edit it and so forth, but ownership and rights rest with the Foundation. Transfering images to Wikipedia from the National Gallery might seem like fair use, but it would also seem to be the transfer of ownership of those images to Wikipedia. To confirm this check the terms and conditions of Wikipedia closely.

Wikipedia is a privately owned US charitable body. There is a question to be answered about the UK Public - who own the pictures in the National Portrait Gallery - making such a large donation of images. Under their changeable licence, Wikipedia owns the images but lets anybody use them providing they attribute Wikipedia. Did the british public consent to this wholesale? Did the British Public consent to the transfer of copyright to Wikipedia?

If thousands of images were downloaded from the National Portrait Gallery, in order to be uploaded to Wikipedia, they were already available for fair use. It seems difficulty to justify that assigning copyright to a Privately owned charity that might decide to end its commitment to any kind of open licence. Which is the clue: Wikipedia licences use; Wikipedia does not grant right to use without favour. Fair Use is fair use, this looks more like cultural asset stripping.