A Fair Portrayal?

As you may have noticed from my post The Linking Feeling, copyright is a subject of interest for me – as much as an armchair observer can be interested at any rate, having studied it’s effect on the cultural industries during my MA.

This article a couple of weeks ago caught my attention, and when a friend forwarded me a link to this article on ArtNet, asking me what I thought…well they didn’t know what they’d started.

To précis both articles, an American volunteer, Derrick Coetzee, working for Wikipedia copied images on the National Portrait Gallery’s website in order to add them to the online entry about the space.  The NPG website uses Zoomify, allowing you to zoom in on areas of the picture in high quality. It appears that Coetzee copied the images in high quality, before adding them to Wikipedia, somehow circumnavigating the protective element of the software – in effect ‘cracking’ the code and ‘ripping’ the images.

Understandably, the NPG weren’t happy, having spent £1m on a digitization project, allowing the images to be added to an online catalogue for users to browse, and are claiming they will loose income from the rights of images that they own.

In the ArtNet article, the author rightly states that:

“the artworks themselves are in some cases many centuries old and thus in the public domain”

Which is true, as the copyright on artwork only last until 70 years after the death of the artist.

However, whilst Coetzee isn’t in breach of the artist’s copyright, he IS in breach of the photographers copyright – the person who took the high quality images for the website in the first place.  As this was being done as part of a service for the Gallery, these rights would have been handed over contractually, to the NPG.

The ArtNet article also highlights a difference between the American legal standard of copyright protection, and that of the UK, with the American seemingly stating that “a faithful copy of a work of art lacks originality” and allowing it to escape copyright protection.  Yet this is a moot point – as I stated in “That Linking Feeling”, copyright law governing a work resides in the country in which the work was created.  As such the copyright law that would govern this instance would be that of the UK, and this would seemingly, in light of the law, find in favour of the National Portrait Gallery.

What this means for the ideals of the internet to allow free access to information, who knows, but, as we’ve seen with the music industry, some of our copyright laws may need to change in the future to help manage technological developments not even considered possible when the laws were written.

Photo thanks to afagen