National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute
In July 2009, lawyers representing the British National Portrait Gallery (NPG) sent an email letter warning of possible legal action for alleged copyright infringement to Derrick Coetzee, a former editor and administrator of the free content multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), after Coetzee uploaded more than 3,300 high-resolution images of artworks, taken from the NPG website, to Wikimedia Commons. The NPG accepted that the artworks depicted were in the public domain, but contended that they owned exclusive rights to their reproductions, demanding that they be removed from Wikimedia Commons.