The National Palace Museum (NPM) is to sue the Palace Museum in Beijing for allegedly violating its copyright covering three valuable ancient Chinese paintings.
The NPM yesterday outlined its plan to take legal action in a report presented to the legislature on how the museum will deal with disputes on issues related to copyright authorization and value-added uses of its collections.
The dispute with the Beijing museum emerged in October last year when Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純) said that the Beijing museum had used images of three popular Chinese paintings in the NPM’s collection without the proper authorization.
Photo: Chang Chi-ming, Taipei Times
Ho cited an album of paintings published by the Palace Museum that contained pictures of the three paintings — Travelers Among Mountains and Streams (谿山行旅圖), Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (富春山居圖) and Early Spring (早春圖).
The pictures were apparently scanned from materials published by the NPM.
Ho accused the Beijing museum of failing to give credit to the NPM and asked then-NPM director Feng Ming-chu (馮明珠) to take legal action against the Beijing institution.
In its report on the case, the NPM said it had asked the Beijing museum several times since then to apply for copyright authorization for the images retroactively, but the Beijing museum never replied.
The NPM then took its lawyers’ advice and commissioned the Intellectual Property Office to handle the dispute based on a cross-strait cooperation agreement on intellectual property protection, the NPM report said.
During talks between the Intellectual Property Office and China’s National Copyright Administration, the latter argued that it was not responsible for verifying the originality of photos of paintings or artifacts, and it suggested that the NPM take legal action to prove its copyright existed.
The Chinese authorities also suggested that the NPM and Beijing Palace Museum establish a communication channel to resolve the dispute together, the NPM report said.
The NPM on Oct. 6 decided on legal action against the Beijing museum, and it has since completed the procedures to authorize others to file the lawsuit on its behalf.
Once the documents necessary for the lawsuit have been compiled, NPM representatives will travel to Beijing for the court proceedings, the NPM said.
Travelers Among Mountains and Streams was painted by Fang Kuan (范寬) in the North Song Dynasty (960 to 1127), while Early Spring was painted by Guo Xi (郭熙) in the same era.
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains is one of the few surviving works by the painter Huang Gongwang (黃公望, 1269 to 1354), who painted it between 1348 and 1350.
The landscape painting was burned into two pieces in 1650, and one of them is stored at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, China, while the other is kept at the NPM in Taipei.
The three paintings are among the most valuable works in the NPM’s collection.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods