Les photos du musée

Le Sismographe, le carnet culturel des journalistes du quotidien montréalais Le Devoir, rapporte le cas d’un internaute des USA qui a téléchargé près de 3000 photos du Musée national du portrait (MNP) au Royaume-Uni. Selon Wiki News,

he complaint by the NPG is that under UK law, its copyright in the photographs of its portraits is being violated. While the gallery has complained to the Wikimedia Foundation for a number of years, this is the first direct threat of legal action made against an actual uploader of images. In addition to the allegation that Coetzee had violated the NPG’s copyright, they also allege that Coetzee had, by uploading thousands of images in bulk, infringed the NPG’s database right, breached a contract with the NPG; and circumvented a copyright protection mechanism on the NPG’s web site.

The copyright protection mechanism referred to is Zoomify, a product of Zoomify, Inc. of Santa Cruz, California. NPG’s solicitors stated in their letter that « Our client used the Zoomify technology to protect our client’s copyright in the high resolution images. ». Zoomify Inc. states in the Zoomify support documentation that its product is intended to make copying of images « more difficult » by breaking the image into smaller pieces and disabling the option within many web browsers to click and save images, but that they « provide Zoomify as a viewing solution and not an image security system ».

In particular, Zoomify’s website comments that while « many customers — famous museums for example » use Zoomify, in their experience a « general consensus » seems to exist that most museums are concerned to make the images in their galleries accessible to the public, rather than prevent the public from accessing them or making copies; they observe that a desire to prevent high resolution images being distributed would also imply prohibiting the sale of any posters or production of high quality printed material that could be scanned and placed online.

Appropriation du domaine public par un musée et libération par un robin des bois numérique? Cas de violation de contrat d’utilisation d’un site par un individu obtus? Le débat est lancé…

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 2009-07-17 à 8 h 37 min.