Virgin Queen stirs up copyright row

In her coronation robes, Elizabeth I looks formidable and stately - the Virgin Queen in her pomp, an image to propel rivals into battle.

Some 400 years after her portrait was painted, that is precisely what she has done.

Hers is one of more than 3000 images from the National Portrait Gallery uploaded on to the free internet encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, in April by Seattle-based Derrick Coetzee. The gallery, founded in 1856, responded last week by threatening legal proceedings against the PhD student.

That action unleashed outrage in cyberspace and quickly led to a stand-off between the proponents of free information and cultural institutions wanting to protect one of their few revenue streams - licence fees for reproducing images of their artworks. The row also goes to the heart of an internet revolution which does not recognise borders or national laws.

The gallery has instructed the law firm Farrer and Co, which represents the Queen, to sue Coetzee unless the pictures are removed. They claim that letters to Wikipedia were unanswered.

While the portraits are long out of copyright, the photographs are not and, the gallery argues, the digitisation process to create high-resolution images has cost it around £1 million ($2.53 million). They are, they say, therefore entitled to a fee.

Wikipedia, which is supporting Coetzee, argues that the portraits are owned by the public. Moreover, they work with many global cultural institutions which are glad to have their images widely disseminated. A further complication is that Coetzee is a United States citizen based in America, where copyright laws around images of publicly owned art are different. The gallery points out that Wikipedia's servers come under the jurisdiction of a UK court.

But Alison Wheeler, an editor and administrator for Wikipedia in the UK, said, "It's a very significant case and very complicated. It gets to the heart of the internet. The Inland Revenue argues that if you buy something online, it doesn't matter where the server is located, you still pay tax.

"My view is that [British] taxes have paid for these, but you can't see them unless you live in London. People have a right to see them."

Media lawyer Duncan Lamont, of Charles Russell solicitors, disagreed. "This is the arrogance of new technology which thinks it can trample over rights and say, 'I'll have this for free' ...

"If somebody has taken a great deal of effort to get the lighting right to produce the best picture possible then they should be protected."

- INDEPENDENT