Great idea about the FOI. If you have news about that, please email or drop me a line on Wikipedia (I’m User:Ragesoss there), as I write for Wikipedia’s community newspaper The Wikipedia Signpost and the results would be of great interest to us.

As to Dan’s question of whether there were links to NPG, the answer is yes, links to the relevant pages at the NPG website were included from when all these images were first uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

On “circumvention of Zoomify”, I don’t think that’s much of an issue. First of all, Zoomify themselves say very clearly that it’s not a security system, it’s an image viewing system. Coetzee and the others who have used the same method to reconstruct hi-res images from Zoomify tiles are not really circumventing it. If the images are public domain, then it’s legal to capture any given tile (after all, it’s just a screengrab copy of a digital copy of a photograph of a PD painting), legal to collect the tiles for one image and stitch them together (because they’re all PD, so you can do whatever you want with them), and legal to do all that automatically with a script. And what’s more, because of the way image compression works, the end result will actually be a different file than the original that’s underneath Zoomify. So Zoomify isn’t being circumvented, it’s being used to provide hi-res public domain images that happen to be part of a larger whole that can be pieced together.

The breach of contract bit is slightly more compelling, but only just.

The real claim that muddies the waters is database right, which I don’t know much about but which seems like simply an unfortunate bit of law.