The whole NPG / Wikimedia thing
Mike Ellis,
electronic museum,
Jul 31, 2009
The whole thing is this: some works of art, such as the portraits in the National Portrait gallery (NPG) are public domain, their copyright having expired decades ago. But conditions imposed by the museum (eg. 'No photo' restrictions) make it impossible to share the images, and the museums release (copyright) reproductions as the only licensed reproductions. Thus, we have a case where public domain content becomes private property. This gets even more tricky when a person accesses this 'private' collection of images and posts them online (in this case, into Wikimedia) and the museum ,a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dcoetzee/NPG_legal_threat">launches a lawsuit. Specifically: is it permissible to break DRM in order to access public domain works, or can these works be effectively privatized though digital locks?
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