Gallery threatens legal action against Wikipedia contributor

The National Portrait Gallery is threatening to sue a Wikipedia contributor over his use of images.

A Wikipedia contributor is facing the threat of a legal battle with the National Portrait Gallery over his use of copyrighted images.

The London museum claims Derrick Coetzee downloaded over 3,000 high resolution images from its website and put them into an archive of free-to-use images on the user-generated encyclopaedia website.

Mr Coetzee lives in the United States, where pictures of works of art are not protected by copyright as they are in the UK. Wikipedia is also a US-based site.

But international lawyers acting on behalf of the National Portrait Gallery claim Mr Coetzee has breached UK copyright laws by uploading images from its collection.

They point out that the images were taken as part of a £1 million project by the gallery to digitise its portraits and paintings.

In a statement, the National Portrait Gallery said it was "very concerned" that Mr Coetzee's actions would threaten its ability to invest in the digitisation programme.

"It is one of the gallery's primary purposes to make as much of the collection available as possible for the public to view," it stated.

"Digitisation involves huge costs including research, cataloguing, conservation and highly-skilled photography. Images then need to be made available on the gallery website as part of a structured and authoritative database."

The National Portrait Gallery claims it has contacted Wikipedia about the intellectual property issue but has not received a response.

Around 120,000 portraits from the 16th Century to the present day are currently housed at the museum, which is located in London near Leicester Square.