EFF Defends Wikipedian's Right to the Public... - Thomas Hawk

"As has been widely reported, the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) recently sent a legal threat to an American Wikipedian, Derrick Coetzee, over his posting approximately 3,000 photos of public domain paintings to Wikipedia. Because of the importance of this issue for the public domain and the Internet generally, EFF has taken Mr. Coetzee as a client. Here's the issue at the heart of this dispute: does something have to be in the public domain in every country on the planet before it can be posted to the Internet anywhere? According to NPG, Mr. Coetzee copied digital photos from NPG's website and uploaded them to Wikipedia (where they are still available). Everyone agrees that the photographs are of public domain paintings in NPG's collection (e.g., this portrait of William Blake painted in 1807). It's also clear under U.S. law that simple reproductions of public domain paintings are themselves not copyrightable, since they lack any "originality" beyond the "sweat of the brow" of the photographer. NPG's lawyers argue that the rule is different under UK copyright law (although there is reason to doubt that it's as clear as NPG suggests) and that Mr. Coetzee is therefore a copyright infringer. NPG also makes several other claims, including that Mr. Coetzee has violated their website's "browsewrap" terms of use, that he violated the NPG's database right by extracting the images from their website, and that he has circumvented a technological measure (apparently Zoomify, which is no longer used on NPG's website) in violation of the UK's version of the DMCA." - Thomas Hawk from Bookmarklet