National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute

Charles Darwin, by John Collier (1883), one of the images uploaded by Coetzee from the National Portrait Gallery's digital collection

In July 2009, lawyers representing the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) sent an email letter warning of possible legal action for alleged copyright infringement to Derrick Coetzee, an editor/administrator of the free content multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.