I see that Mathsci (T-C-L-K-R-D) has chosen to extend the dispute between Wikipedia and UK copyright law. He is already trying to justify his copying of this image from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and has just loaded another from the Tate museum web site (However, the following acts are prohibited in respect of any of the content featured on this website: [...] any form of reproduction whatsoever, including without limitation, the extraction and/or storage in any retrieval system or inclusion in any other computer program or work ). Presumably he is intending to bring the rights issue to a head by embroiling WP in legal rows with no fewer than three UK museums simultaneously. Hilarious!

Supplementary: I see he has also dragged in the Handel House Museum and the Royal Collections.

The sculpture one is on shaky ground as an original composition, and I'd support deleting it. I've no problem personally with the Tate one though - it's a low-resolution copy, not a high-resolution image of the type that involves significant labor in its own right to create, which (as I understand it) was the issue regarding the NPG images.

I don't see how the V&A image is PD in the United States, unless the argument is that the UK's "freedom of panorama" applies to the sculpture.

Edit: No wait, that last bit doesn't apply here at all. That's for people wishing to take photographs of copyrighted works of art situated in public places, and this work of art is in the public domain. So yeah, I see no argument at all for this photo being in the public domain in either the UK or the US.

S62 CDPA88 exemption would certainly apply to the sculpture if the uploader has taken the photo themself ("it is not an infringement of copyright to film, photograph, broadcast or make a graphic image of a building, sculpture, models for buildings or work of artistic craftsmanship if that work is permanently situated in a public place or in premises open to the public") - but I'd personally say that someone else's photo of it would be an original composition copyrighted to the photographer. IANAL etc, though.

Yeah, I realized I was on crack on that point as you posted it (see the edit above).

He doesn't even give attribution to the photographers. He only indicates a link to the source but indicates the "Author" as the painter or sculpture of the underlying work. Apparently Wikipedia does not know the difference between a actual artifact and a depiction of the artifact. They seem to believe they have appropriated for themselves the actual artifact and magically placed it online. This adds intellectual dishonesty to the copyvio.

In fairness "Wikipedia" is quite clear on the difference. Mathsci appears not to be.

It is a breach of the TOS of the site - whatever that might mean in practice.

Absolutely nothing, if no affirmative act is required to accept the TOS. It's well-established that terms of service that one does not have to affirmatively accept are unenforceable. A link to the Terms of Service at the bottom of the page? Not good enough. Has to be a clickthrough ("I accept" button at some point, with no access until the button is clicked) or it might as well not be there.

I don't know if this applies to this particular site under discussion, but in general very few sites have clickthrough terms unless they're registration-only. I argued for clickthrough terms on Wikipedia once, but that was deemed to interfere too much with the "ease of editing".

You could be right. But since Mathsci is British, with a presence in the UK, he may well find himself an easier target than Coetzee for a test case.

Maybe Mathsci created the work ab initio, like JzG has been known to do!

If you look at the V&A image of sculpture I uploaded, you will note that as soon as it was put there (as an alternative angle of the Roubiliac sculpture), I contacted user VAwebteam by email on July 24th to discuss the new image showing Handel's left arm resting on a bound copy of Alexander's Feast. (They uploaded the previous image of the sculpture.) I've not heard from them yet. These are the team that manage V&A images on wikipedia. I also discussed this with Dirck Beetstra as VAwebteam recommended on their user page. There is also a discussion on
the PUI page with ref to VAwebteam.

I did briefly consider using the image of the ageing Handel uploaded by Dcoetzee, but opted for the Royal Collection picture, which is low resolution. It is actually now on display in the Handel House Museum in the London Room. I discussed the rewriting of the WP article with the volunteers that work there and might get back to them if I happen to be in London again this summer.

As with the article on Chateau of Vauvenargues where copyright applies to almost all of Picasso's work, I opted for a way of illustrating via external links Handel's clavichord, spinet, harpsichord and house organ and rooms in the Museum. There seems to be no problem with the low resolution paintings. I do note that at the British Library there are two kinds of images - printable ones which are low resolution (the ones I used) and zoomable images. I think they would get annoyed if someone tried to recover the whole of the zoomable image.

Why doesn't the information on the image clearly indicate this consent and aren't you up to your elbows in original research that includes the unacknowledged and attributed work of the museum staff?

Because we are still waiting for the reply to the email (sent July 24th). I put a reminder about the email on the user page of VAwebteam. If you look at the article there is no original research since this is mentioned on the cited V&A website as well as the HandelHaus in Halle (Handel's birthplace):

GF Handel portraits 1736-1738

and in numerous scholarly articles, eg "Fam'd Handel Breathing, tho' Transformed to Stone": The Composer as Monument, Suzanne Aspden, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 39-90, to cite but one (now added to the article just to keep you quiet). There is no shortage of Handel scholarship.

In the original discussion about Dcoetzee, I mentioned that in writing

The Four Seasons (Poussin)

I had used the French government databases joconde and atlas for images. Exactly the same issue, but you
said nothing then. Did you know about VAwebteam and the existing image of the Roubiliac sculpture on WP?