{"id":217,"date":"2009-07-16T21:41:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-16T21:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/?p=217"},"modified":"2009-07-16T23:18:32","modified_gmt":"2009-07-16T23:18:32","slug":"wikimedia-writes-on-the-npg-legal-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2009\/07\/16\/wikimedia-writes-on-the-npg-legal-threat\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikimedia writes on the NPG legal threat."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Erik M&ouml;ller&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wikimedia.org\/2009\/07\/16\/protecting-the-public-domain-and-sharing-our-cultural-heritage\/\">posted to the Wikimedia blog<\/a> on the issue. Note the correction of the NPG&#8217;s claims that Wikimedia never responded to them (rather than responding with &#8220;Bridgeman v. Corel, go away&#8221;) &mdash; Erik assumes good faith and presumes this is in error.<\/p>\n<p>About the best roundup of coverage so far is <a href=\"http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/User:Dcoetzee\/NPG_legal_threat\/Coverage\">Dcoetzee&#8217;s own link collection<\/a> &mdash; press and blog posts. I liked the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikinews.org\/wiki\/U.K._National_Portrait_Gallery_threatens_U.S._citizen_with_legal_action_over_Wikimedia_images\">WikiNews story<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Other British taxpayers as annoyed at the NPG&#8217;s waste of their money as I am have been putting in FOI requests to see just how much money they make from keeping it all to themselves (&pound;378k before expenses &mdash; what are the expenses? six staff, what else?), how much they&#8217;re spending on legal representation, what proportion of their web hits are from Wikimedia links and so forth.<\/p>\n<p>(One request that should be made: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whatdotheyknow.com\/request\/income_from_online_rights#incoming-23194\">&pound;10-15k annually from web licenses<\/a> &mdash; they need to be asked how much the person handling these licenses is paid. They make more money <i>selling food in the caf&eacute;<\/i>. Suggest your best prospective FOI requests in the comments!)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m suspecting a severe case of bureaucratic empire building here: the bureaucrats honestly think the paintings belong to <i>them<\/i> rather than to <i>us<\/i>. Which is what one might see from a private for-profit corporation, but is rather less than acceptable for a <i>government sub-department<\/i>, not even an independent charity. As Sage Ross <a href=\"http:\/\/ragesossscholar.blogspot.com\/2009\/07\/self-preservation-and-national-portrait.html\">notes<\/a> from Clay Shirky&#8217;s <i>Here Comes Everybody<\/i>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to job number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Erik M&ouml;ller&#8217;s posted to the Wikimedia blog on the issue. Note the correction of the NPG&#8217;s claims that Wikimedia never responded to them (rather than responding with &#8220;Bridgeman v. Corel, go away&#8221;) &mdash; Erik assumes good faith and presumes this is in error. About the best roundup of coverage so far is Dcoetzee&#8217;s own link &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2009\/07\/16\/wikimedia-writes-on-the-npg-legal-threat\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Wikimedia writes on the NPG legal threat.&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wiki"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4FmVR-3v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}