US courts have already found that such images are not protectable under copyright, and I don’t think it should be here, either. Moreover, I don’t care if such a decision harms the business models of stock photography libraries. If they can’t add value, over and above being the only source of an image of 100-year-old paintings, then they don’t deserve to survive in an era of free copies of publicly-owned content.

Dover Books has built a business that includes reprinting out-of-copyright music scores. I have several of their books, such as a volume of Brahms’s symphonies. But anyone else is able to publish this same material, and it’s perfectly legal to download those same Brahms scores from the International Music Score Library Project. That this is so hasn’t prevented Dover from being able to sustain their business model.

Copyright doesn’t exist to keep the stock libraries in business, it exists to encourage the creation of artistic and creative works by providing an economic mechanism that artists can exploit to earn a living. But it lapses after (a ridiculously long) time so we can all use the work.

The major confounding problem with the NPG is that they’re hoarding the originals, and telling the public they can’t access them on the same terms that the NPG has abrogated to itself.

The action, by the NPG and others, is effectively a form of economic filibustering, gaming the copyright system at the public’s expense to retain control of images that now belong to all of us.

You can almost understand a private company acting like this, trying to get the most out of the system, but to have a publicly-supported institution like the NPG doing it is, IMHO, unacceptable.

(*) I also don’t accept the notion that, just because the equipment used to make the scans is expensive or complex to operate, that somehow its output is an “investment” that deserves protection. Courts tend to agree with that, too.

But that’s not how it works. If it were, there wouldn’t be stock libraries – such as the Bridgeman Library – from which one can buy licences to use high-quality digital images of out-of-copyright paintings.

Considering just the issue of someone making a high-quality digital representation of an out-of-copyright painting, I think that they should have some rights on their photograph because it isn’t ONLY a representation of a painting; the digital copy only came about through someone’s significant time, cost and effort.

That said, I think that one should be able to go to a gallery and take one’s own photos (whilst not hindering other people’s access to the works) and do what they like with them.

While the galleries may be making next to nothing from these licenses, there are individual human beings who are earning quite respectable salaries from the whole licensing process. Obviously these people don’t want to lose their jobs! Indeed, they seem inclined to fight to protect their jobs, whatever the cost in logical consistency with the duties of their employers or even UK copyright law.

It is excellent news that the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery are negotiating to avoid an expensive and unjustified court case. I hope the negotiations work out. But I remain very, very wary, it is not yet the moment for optimism.

But, I’m curious to know if you’ve considered the possibility that it is always unethical to suspend the public’s liberty to share or build upon published works?

It should be recognised that it is just as wrong to sue Jammie Thomas for sharing copies of 24 published MP3 files as it is wrong to sue Derrick Coatzee for sharing copies of 3,300 published images. Why should members of the public be sued millions for distributing what has been delivered to them?

“Licensing the hell out of a copyrighted work” = “Persecuting the hell out of individuals enjoying their natural right to liberty: their cultural liberty to share and build upon that work”

Copyright=Sociopathy

One result from the ones people have gathered so far is that the licensing business doesn’t appear to be a nice little earner. Indeed, it seems to barely make a profit over costs.

I heartily endorse the situation in the United States, where documents produced by federal agencies are explicitly placed in the public domain immediately by dint of their governmental origin, for the public to do whatever it likes with. The public paid for it, so the public owns it. Easy.

None of this the-law-of-the-land-is-copyright nonsense over there.

All records created by Gallery staff in the course of their official role as employees of the Gallery, including writing, photographs, videos, slides and electronic data, are Public Records according to the Public Records Acts of 1958 and 1967. As such they belong to the Gallery and the Gallery owns copyright.

Public records? Anyone for a Freedom of Information Act request?!