That's a very nice post.

However, it would be unsuitable for use by Wikimedia as the resolution is below 150,000x100,000 as - obviously - it's not the same unless you can view it at 1:1 and have your entire monitor displaying the Mona Lisa's nosehair.

Then it's just as well he took them from a server hosted in the US.

Oh, wait...

Ok, copying a couple of high-res images down from the NPG site to use as PC wallpaper is one thing but pulling 3000+ images...? If he downloaded them with the intent to push them up to the Wikimedia servers (pulling the works from a UK server in the process) then I'd say they were copied in the UK - UK law applies.

I think the NPG were willing to compromise with access to the collection at medium resolution. But, seemingly, that wasn't good enough and Wikimedia (or one of it's henchmen) saw fit to grab the high-res versions.

'...a decent resolution...'?

How big a monitor would you have in order to view these paintings at what you believe to be a 'decent resolution'?

How would a higher resolution image help? Sure, you can get really close in on an image but, surely, on a 20" screen it tends to lose impact...?

Or are you thinking that they might print it out? A4? Really, given that the NPG allow people access to the medium-res images, why on Earth do you believe you need to have the high-res images? How are you going to view the high-res image?

How about a good-quality medium-resolution version? Y'know, a bit like the one the NPG would've let Wikimedia have for free...?

S'funny - the Smithsonian'll charge you to obtain their collection, too:

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/rights/index.cfm

You don't suspect there's a degree of hypocrisy in the Wikimedia stance, do you?

Yep - totally agree with that.

At my place of work there was a requirement for a fairly simple call-logging application - nothing too complex, few screens, bit of reporting, but needed to be done in three weeks.

The plan was to develop this in .NET using a team out in India. As a safety net the project manager had a word with me and asked about parallel-developing the application in Oracle Application Express. Not a problem I said, and had an app which could go into production a week before required. (I'm a DBA who does bits of Apex stuff on the side, so it wasn't a straight two weeks).

Well, that was back in September. Four months later and the scheduled delivery date for the .NET application is March. Oh, and the .NET version is missing all the charting I'd put in there (which is a breeze to do in Apex).

Quite why it's taken so long to do the .NET development of such a trivial application is beyond me.