The battle over Wikipedia's use of images from a British art gallery's website has intensified¹.

维基百科使用英国美术馆网站上的图片之间的纠纷已经升级。

Work by Sir Joshua Reynolds was among those uploaded to Wikipedia

The online encyclopaedia²（百科全书） has accused the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) of betraying its public service mission.

But the gallery has said it needs to recoup（重获，补偿） the £1m cost of its digitisation programme and claims Wikipedia has misrepresented（误称） its position.

The NPG is threatening legal action after 3,300 images from its website were uploaded to Wikipedia.

The high-resolution images were uploaded by Wikipedia volunteer David Coetzee.

Now Erik Moeller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation which runs the online encyclopaedia, has laid out the organisation's stance in a blog post.

'Empire building'

He said most observers would think the two sides should be "allies not adversaries（敌手，对手）" and that museums and other cultural institutions should not pursue extra revenue at the expense of limiting public access to their material.

"It is hard to see a plausible³（似认真的，似合理的） argument that excluding public domain⁴ content from a free, non-profit encyclopaedia serves any public interest whatsoever," he wrote.

He points out that two German photographic archives donated 350,000 copyrighted images for use on Wikipedia, and other institutions in the United States and the UK have seen benefits in making material available for use.

Another Wikipedia volunteer David Gerard has blogged about the row, claiming that the National Portrait Gallery makes only £10-15,000 a year from web licensing⁵, less than it makes "selling food in the cafe".

But the gallery insists that its case has been misrepresented, and has now released a statement denying many of the charges made by Wikipedia.

It denies claims that it has been "locking up and limiting access to educational materials", saying that it has been a pioneer in making its material available.

It has worked for the last five years toward the target of getting half of its collection online by 2009. "We will be able to achieve this," said the gallery's statement,"as a result of self-generated income."

The gallery says that while it only makes a limited revenue from web licensing, it earns far more from the reproduction of its images in books and magazines - £339,000 in the last year.

But it says the present situation jeopardises（使……遭遇危险） its ability to fund its digitisation process from its own resources.