I had not intended to blog about the National Portrait Gallery threatening to sue Wikipedia over the latter’s publication of copies of paintings in the gallery, as I thought it would be obvious to anyone that this is a blatant attempt to use physical possession of a work to get around the expirations of copyrights. Tactics like this can effectively extend copyright indefinitely.

However, this is apparently not the case. Lot of people seem to think that Wikipedia “robbed” the National Portrait Gallery, which never even held the original copyrights in the first place.

The NPG is arguing that there was work involved in taking the photographs, so these exact reproductions are protected by copyright. British law may just take this view, especially as it was a collection of photographs rather than a single one, however both Wikipedia and the contributor who uploaded the photos are in the US — and even under British law Wikipedia may well win if it came to court.

The NPG’s case relies on a “sweat of the brow” doctrine that has unfortunately got some recognition in British courts. I wonder how far this could be pushed? If I photocopied an out of copyright encyclopaedia, it would be a lot of work, but it seems silly to suggest that I should have copyright over the photocopy. Do Project Gutenberg volunteers have copyrights over the works public domain works they type in?

Regardless of how far they can push copyright law, one would have hoped that an institution funded by public money and donations would want to make art accessible as possible, and would have been prepared to sacrifice the tiny proportion of its income that comes from licensing in order to make art more accessible to the public. What exactly is its mission in the first place?