The wedding invitation that wasn’t
I was quite looking forward to opening the letter that arrived from Germany last week. I thought it was probably a wedding invitation, although it was a bit odd that it was sent to me, not Anna, as it’s really Anna’s friends who are getting married. And odd, too, that it wasn’t addressed to both of us. And it looked a bit thin.
So I wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t a wedding invitatin, but was somewhat shocked when I found inside an official-looking letter accusing me of breach of copyright, and suggesting various amounts of money that I might be interested in paying.
The letter was from an organisation which appears to administer the estate of Ernst Barlach, a sculptor who died in 1938. I’d taken some photos of his sculptures in a museum in the States and put the photos on the web. The sculptures, of course, are copyright Ernst Barlach (or his estate), but they claim that any photographs of the sculptures are similarly copyrighted. Which seems odd to this non-lawyer.
I removed the photos and have sent them a letter of apology. I’ve no idea if that will suffice. I don’t want to become a copyright martyr, and I suspect I’m not worth the lawyers’ fees to them. It seems the German Wikipedia had an almost identical communication from them last year. I don’t know what happened there, either, but certainly the photos in question are no longer on their site.
