100,000 images stolen from Taiwanese art museum
Around 100,000 art images have been stolen from the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, after hackers accessed the high-resolution image archive.
These valuable scans of the museum’s art collection are now being sold on online Chinese marketplaces for under £1. The hacked files include scans of paintings, calligraphy and ancient texts.
The fear among Taiwanese experts is that these high-resolution copies will be used to flood the market with prints, affecting the original value of the official pieces.
Currently, the museum’s own authorised prints sell for around £300-£1600, offering quality assurance to buyers. These cheap, low-quality alternatives may swing the market and drive down overall prices.
Most of the pieces are currently being sold online by Taobao, a subsidiary of Alibaba – China’s biggest online commerce company. The museum’s lawyers have reached out to the company to ask them to remove all of the hacked listings. As of yet, Taobao are yet to respond.
The situation is exacerbated by the current political problems between the two countries. “We are looking into it and have hired lawyers to raise to Taobao about the intellectual properties and damages involved,” the museum’s director Huang Yung-tai director said in a statement.
