So you're suggesting the "from the louvre" tag refers to the image not the canvas?

Yes. That's part of the December deal. One wonders if she got involved in the June deal with the hope of making her own arrangements to repay the $22m. The Phillips de Pury deal came that Fall, possibly as a signal that other options had been closed off. Finally, in December she capitulates.

I have no idea what the motivations were. The point I am more interested in is that the three main sources of value for Leibovitz have all collapsed since the June 2008 deal. The photography market is down substantially; the real estate market has collapsed and Conde Nast is engaged in a cost cutting campaign.

From Kaldari's link above, an excerpt from the letter he received from the NPG lawyer. Wikipedia's appropriation of those images is theft until the law is tested and some of these arguments are addressed:

Under current UK law (26 October 2006), a skilfully taken photograph of an ex-copyright painting still enjoys copyright protection.

The Bridgeman case (Bridgeman v Corel, 97 Civ. 6232 (LAK), New York Southern District Court, United States), is often cited in challenge to this. The judgement was that there can be no copyright in photographs of two-dimensional ex-copyright works.

However, this judgement is NOT binding in the UK or in other jurisdictions and, and in many people's opinion, is of doubtful authority even in the States. It has had little practical effect if any on the image licensing industry. Please see www.museumscopyright.org.uk/bridge.htm for further details.

The judge in the Bridgeman case reached the only reasonable decision he could given the facts by Bridgeman's lawyer. It has been said that, had a different lawyer presented the facts in another way, the outcome could have well been different. For example, Bridgeman's lawyer did not even cite Graves' Case (1869, LR 4 QB 715), which held that a photograph of an engraving of a painting was an "original photograph" and therefore protected under the 1862 Fine Art Copyright Act.

First of all, commentary is supposed to be biased. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth making as commentary.

Second, your sanctimony on the issue seems to stem from your role at Wikipedia. That bias is fine too. But your statements as to what's good for the museum and good for the public are presumptuous.

Finally, if the legal threats are spurious--I think you mean specious--you've got nothing to worry about. The threats are harmless and without force. On the other hand, if you've been involved with theft and the threats are real. You might want to think seriously about complying with their requests.

The terms were unacceptable to you so you just created your own? I'm afraid that's theft. To alter the law to suit your own needs is still breaking the law. I don't see any threats in the documents you posted. They wrote you some very civil notes considering you'd taken their images without permission and have refused to honor their rights.

Are you sure about this?

Whether the high-resolution images are or are not public property is actually untested in law. We don yet know whether a digital copy of a public domain work has a copyright of its own.

I think the law in the US is pretty clear that the Hi-res image is a work in its own right and the person who made it has rights that can be protected. But I could be mistaken.

Where do you get this:

The theft accusation could easily extend to NPG: they took public funds under good faith that they would make their archive available to the public.

I'm afraid you're both misreading the events. The volunteer used a program to unscramble copyrighted material. That's an act of theft: taking something without permission. The paintings may be owned by the government--or the NPG may have a charter that makes it private or gives it some other status--but the high-resolution images are not public property. And when wikipedia makes them available they're also making them available to other private individuals to exploit those images for private gain, not the public interest.

All of the issues you raise could be legitimately settled through negotiations or even court cases. But simply taking the images because one feels they're entitled to them--your act of "liberation"--is theft.

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