National Portrait Gallery v. Coetzee [1]

Counsel for the National Portrait Gallery in London sent a cease-and-desist letter [2] to a U.S. citizen in July 2009, complaining about his posting of images of thousands of its portraits on Wikimedia Commons [3], a site associated with Wikipedia. The gallery claims Derrick Coetzee violated U.K. law by breaching the museum's copyright in the photographs of artworks. In its letter, the gallery demanded that Coetzee remove the images from the site and delete any other copies of the images in his possession.  The deputy director of Wikimedia Foundation stated in a blog post [4] that the site stands by Coetzee's uploads and that Coetzee did not violate any applicable law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann is representing Coetzee pro bono.  von Lohmann sent a response letter [5] on July 19, disputing the National Portrait Gallery's claims.