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.
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