[WikiEN-l] [bhorrocks at npg.org.uk: National Portrait Gallery images on Wikipedia website]

Wed Aug 4 08:42:25 UTC 2004

--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> It would please me greatly to be able to respond that their claims are
> preposterous.  Shall we research this carefully?

IANAL

Exact reproductions of public domain portraits are not creative works and thus
not eligible for copyright protection in the U.S. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources has long
said:
|Accurate photographs of paintings lack expressive content and are 
|automatically in the public domain once the painting's copyright has expired
|(which it has in the US if it was published before 1923). All other copyright
| notices can safely be ignored. 

Posts about this from Aug 2003 by Alex:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-August/006049.html 
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-August/006019.html

Quote:

|See Bridgeman Art Library ltd. v. Corel Corp. SDNY (1999) 36 F. Supp. 
|2d 191.
|
|You can read the case here:
|http://www.constitution.org/1ll/court/fed/bridgman.html
|Copyright of photographs of works that are in the public domain are not
|original enough to afford them protection under US copyright law, even when
|such works might be protected in other countries that afford greater
| protection than US law.

and

|The Bridgeman case was a British publisher; it is important to
|remember the national treatment principle in international copyright law.
|The regarguement in Bridgeman surrounded around the question of
|applying British law to infringement under US law.  It was put aside
|because the British case on which Bridgeman relied was no longer
|good law in the UK (it was an 1865 that said a photograph that was
|just a copy of something else was copyrightable because at that
|time it was not just "slavish copying" as it is now considered.

So I would say that their claim is bogus. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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