They’re funded by the public – if they need more money, they should ask the public, rather than try to extract it through internet taxes.

If they need a revenue stream they should make high quality prints available for sale, or coffee table art books. That would be in line with getting these images in front of the public’s eyes, the main purpose that they server and get public funds for.

in the real world, when your revenue stream starts to dry up, you root hog, or die. Why doesn’t the NPG hire some staff to work on new ways of making money?

In the world of private business, your enterprise is understood to have no inherent value, only the value assigned it by the market. Publicly-funded enterprises, on the other hand, are understood to have an inherent value that is not supported by the market. You don’t want your national gallery staff sorting out ways to make money “or die”, you want them running the gallery. Otherwise auction the portraits off, sell the grounds, and call it a day.

And while I have an antipathy to this pursuit of copyright, I’m also sympathetic to a public institution with a dwindling budget feeling desperate about even 5% of its funding. I’m sure a follow-up post will delve into why the NPG feels so fiscally insecure- right?

Actually no. The digital viewing was free. What they want to control is the high resolution files that would allow someone to print up 20×16 gallery quality prints which are then flogged cheap on eBay, as the printer didn’t have to pay to create the digital files. These would directly compete with the ones that the NPG sells the revenue of which enables them to make more works available digitally.

The NPG wanted money for a good quality copy of the image, which I thought was of course reasonable, and money for the use of the photograph which I did not – not for an exhibition which was likely to be seen by fewer than 500 people.

The point is, not only do they claim copyright on their photographs of the paintings, but they also claim copyright on any pictures you take too… when I suggested I could come to the Gallery and take my own picture, I was told the same charges would apply.

I think pictures which beong to the nation and are out of copyright should be in the pubic domain… I think there should be away of funding that without restricting the public access to the out-of-copyright material.

The Gallery itself argued that they wanted to raise the quality of the prints and photographs of their images which are used – the best way of doing that would be to release the high-res images as being in the public domain, and find other ways of raising money.

Sometimes I feel that public bodies and charities lose sight of their purpose in favour of making money at every turn. They say that the aim of the National Portrait Gallery, London is ‘to promote through the medium of portraits the appreciation and understanding of the men and women who have made and are making British history and culture, and … to promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media’. How better to do this than through Wikipedia?

From the strictly legal angle it sounds like the NPG may have grounds to restrict access to these works. But from a common-sense (and by “common” I mean “common among people who think exactly like me”) moral standpoint it makes me very uncomfortable.

the high res images’ main function would be for use in academic presentations and publications. if the pictures were freely available from a third party, then collection managers would not see a ‘return’ in the next column, when assessing the efficacy of their department. now, in a public museum, a ‘return’ does not necessarily have to be fiscal – it can be a publication; the number of participants in a workshop; number of respondents to a questionnaire; participants in volunteer training; positive/negative feedback; personal or detailed collections enquiries; submissions of objects or memories to the collection. by devolving control of the object and its likeness, all this feedback and engagement is something museums miss – despite their best efforts. we *want* to know how you feel about these objects, what they mean to you and so on. when information is scattered and unattributed, we lose our ability to commit it to historical record, and do not have the resources to go chasing after it.

the thing is, the only ‘return’ that comes from releasing high-res images of your own collection, is that other people will use it to make money. why not have a piece of that cake? there is very little funding available for public museums at the moment. an image in an useable, ‘will-do’ format (i.e. not for academic publication), of course, is fair game, and they should be available on line for all to use, see and explore. this is what most members of the public ask for when making a request for an image anyway.

what does a high-res image provide for the general user, that a med-res image does not? you only really need the kind of detail provided by specialist photography if you are making copies of the image for use elsewhere.

also – you forget that the curator is legally bound to look after the object and its likeness, through thick and thin. it a complicated, and often emotive subject, but is all part of being a cultural advocate.

The other issue here is that Wikipedia seems to be ignoring local laws, believing that because USA copyright law differs on this issue, all’s fine. That leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth.

Tricky. It may take some time finding such a revenue mechanism…

The Digital Art Auction is a means of determining the equivalent retail price of a digitally representable work of art if each bidder paid the same price (not exceeding their valuation).

Thus, if 3,300 images cost £1,000,000 to digitise then each image need only fetch £300 at auction to break even. £300 could be raised by 30 people bidding at least £10, 300 bidding at least £1, or 3,000 at 10p, etc.

Therefore, there are indeed ways of enabling the public to pay for works to be published that don’t involve suspending their liberty to share and build upon their cultural heritage (and that don’t involve dubious taxation).

As far as I am aware, the implementation of the Digital Art Auction closest to completion is currently: https://www.liberateip.com

NB There are many implementations of the Street Performer Protocol, but this is simply a means of collecting donations of varying amounts with a refund in the event the target fund isn’t reached. See http://fundable.com.

“It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopaedia serves any public interest whatsoever,” he wrote

1stly you should make clear who “he” is. (Deputy Director Wikimedia Foundation)

2ndly the quote does not address the possible legal issues: are the photos themselves under copyright? and did the US person who circumvented the protection to obtain the complete hi res images break UK law in obtaining them? (despite being in the US). But you did address the legal issue in your comments before the quote from BBC article.

If you believe the public wants to subsidize the creation of commercial art-books, then get out of the art-gallery business, start a publisher

Why can’t they do both?

I am not really surprised that the NPG reacted as they did. They probably have a case under UK law, and that placing high res copies on wiki will eat into their income.

I don’t know if you have already done so, but you could mention that the NPG has already offered to make low res copies available to wikipedia.

An aside: if you allow free use of cameras, how do you stop people accidentally setting off their flash? My guess would be that 5-10% of people won’t turn them off properly. (I am of course assuming that flashes have been shown to speed up damage to paintings or other art)

Another group I’m involved with used to hold a major book award ceremony in the Science Museum. When admission charges were abolished on government order, our previously free event suddenly was going to cost us £6,000. The UK’s major museums are now all doing everything they can to raise extra revenue, but as Cory has noted it seems doubtful that the NPG is actually getting that much money from selling prints.

the BBC jealously guards its additional DVD income and shies away from any kind of public archive that might undermine it, saying that the five percent of its budget derived from commercial operations is so important that the material funded with the other 95 percent of its income — which comes directly from the public — should be locked up.

Actually it’s more like 75% of the BBC’s income that comes from licence fees…

I had an odd lurching feeling, like discovering an account had been hacked. Luckily, on reading Simon’s posts it’s turns out he’s genuine, erudite and funny. Suddenly I wouldn’t mind being mixed up for the guy. I do sometimes wish I’d been named Bob though.

Can’t wiki just use the lo-res and NPG still profit from publishing? As Orangebag notes this has been suggested by the NPG.

Increasingly here, when you look for the facts behind the headline, I’m finding it’s a different story. More rigour please!

An aside: if you allow free use of cameras, how do you stop people accidentally setting off their flash?

The Cluny Museum in Paris achieves this by employing assistants to multilingually berate anyone who does use a flash. After witnessing one woman getting a prolonged tongue-lashing, I was very careful to ensure my flash was off.

Thank the Old Ones that nobody from the gallery stooped to making an accommodation like providing Wiki with lovely high resolution scans of the portraiture with a watermark band along the bottom promoting the museum. Imagine the fallout from that, ruin! Why, people would not only see pictures on their screens but they would know where they could find the actual graphical artifacts.

…the BBC jealously guards its additional DVD income and shies away from any kind of public archive that might undermine it.

I believe you’re wrong about this. I know for a fact that the BBC are currently internally beta testing a version of the iplayer which has access to the entire digitized BBC archive. Pending the testing, it is slated for public release sometime next year.

“Taking these photographs is a very skilled process, involves a number of people/equipment/lighting (actually photographing paintings this well is one of the hardest things to photograph), and can only be done when the gallery is closed (adding to expense).”

The problem with this line of reasoning is that these images are in all likelihood already photographed and archived on slides or as digital files (and thus quite easily and inexpensively converted if necessary and published to the web–even if “zoomified,” since that’s a free application). Any responsible curator would have high quality images of the originals for insurance purposes, and even if that weren’t the case many of these will also have been archived as high quality copies for printed material already.

In fact, while many of the offending Wikimedia images are beautiful copies of the originals, others are look like they’re just scans from prints — you can see the dots:

e.g.:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Anne_Boleyn.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Anne_of_Cleves.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Anne_of_Denmark_in_mourning.jpg