A recent Court of Appeal (England and Wales) case has clarified that there is no new copyright in photographs reproducing 2D artworks that are themselves in the public domain - and that (as many of us have argued) this has been the case since at least 2009. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/12/29/court-of-appeal-ruling-will-prev… -- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org mailto:wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk

Since I have also established, through a Freedom of Information request, that the National Gallery has been losing money on its image licensing operation, hopefully it will embrace this chance to abolish image fees altogether. Then the gallery, art historians and the public, will be practically, legally, culturally and financially better off.

A recent Court of Appeal (England and Wales) case has clarified that there is no new copyright in photographs reproducing 2D artworks that are themselves in the public domain - and that (as many of us have argued) this has been the case since at least 2009. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/12/29/court-of-appeal-ruling-will-prev… -- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk

I'm slightly confused by the article. It refers to THJ vs Sheridan (2023) but that ruling was about software-generated graphs and said nothing about reproducing out-of-copyright content?

Re: "It is certainly strange to me that some cultural organisations pursue image licensing as a loss making venture that also borders on copyfraud..." I'm hoping that museums will still want to spend money on digitising their content. But we need to be realistic, if they can't subsidise that by getting at least some of the money back from image licensing, they may do less of it. Of course rumour has it that some institutions weren't even getting as much from image licencing as it cost them to market and sell those images. My hope is that fewer institutions will think of digitisation in terms of fundraising and more in terms of fulfilling their mission of preserving and recording their collection and making their collections available to all. But my fear is that there will be more items that can only be seen if visited and the only available images are photos of the painting on mugs and jigsaws from the museum shop. Jonathan On Wed, 3 Jan 2024 at 14:39, Andy Mabbett <andy(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk