How Glasgow's Street Art and Public Imagery Ended Up in a Legal and Ethical Tangle Over Duplicate Images

Glasgow City Council's planning and public realm departments are sitting on a growing problem that has been years in the making. Across regeneration zones from Govan to Dennistoun, duplicate images — murals, photographic installations, and commissioned artwork reproduced without fresh authorisation — have appeared on hoardings, heritage boards, and community centre walls, often because original licensing agreements were never properly archived or followed up when contracts expired.

The issue did not appear overnight. It is the product of at least three overlapping pressures: an accelerated push to beautify post-industrial neighbourhoods through the City Council's Glasgow City Heritage Trust grant programmes, an inconsistent digital asset management system that left image rights tracking largely on paper until 2021, and a legal grey zone around commissioned public art that Scottish courts have only intermittently addressed.

How the Problem Built Up

The roots go back to around 2014, when Glasgow launched a series of coordinated streetscape improvement schemes tied to the Commonwealth Games legacy programme. Community groups and housing associations — including some operating along the Gallowgate and in the Calton area — received funding to commission murals and photographic displays. Many of those agreements were handled informally, with artists receiving one-off payments and no explicit clause governing reproduction rights for future use.

When those same images were later digitised and reused on heritage trail boards, tourism leaflets produced by Glasgow Life, or community regeneration hoardings, they fell into a category lawyers sometimes call "orphaned works" — images whose rights holders are either unknown, no longer reachable, or simply never contacted again. The Glasgow City Heritage Trust, which has administered historic environment grants in the city since 2007, has acknowledged in its published annual reports that record-keeping for smaller commissioned works was inconsistent in the years prior to the introduction of its current digital management systems.

Merchant City became something of a test case. A series of photographic portraits installed on shuttered shopfronts along Candleriggs around 2017 as part of a temporary public art scheme were still visible — reproduced on laminated boards — as late as 2024, long after the original six-month licence had elapsed. The artists involved, according to public correspondence published on the council's planning portal, wrote to Glasgow City Council's Culture and Sport directorate on at least two occasions asking for the works to be either relicensed or removed.

Where Things Stand Now

The practical consequence is a patchwork of imagery across the city that nobody has clean rights to. A survey carried out by the Glasgow-based arts advocacy organisation NAN (National Artist Network Scotland) and shared with the council in late 2024 identified more than 340 instances of potentially unlicensed image reproduction on publicly funded infrastructure across the city's 21 wards. That figure has not been independently verified by the council, which said at the time it was reviewing the findings.

For the artists affected, the financial stakes are not trivial. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which applies across Scotland, reproducing a commissioned artwork beyond the scope of the original licence agreement without permission can expose the reproducing party to damages claims. Legal advice obtained by several Glasgow-based artists and shared publicly through the Federation of Scottish Theatre's newsletter in March 2025 suggested that settlements in comparable cases in Edinburgh had ranged from £1,500 to upwards of £12,000 depending on the duration and scale of the unauthorised reproduction.

Glasgow City Council's Culture and Communities directorate is expected to publish a revised public art commissioning framework before the end of 2026. That framework, if adopted, would require all future publicly funded image commissions to include explicit multi-use licensing clauses from the point of contract, and would establish a centralised digital register for publicly installed artwork across the city. Community groups currently holding images under expired agreements have been advised by the council to seek independent legal guidance rather than simply remove or replace works unilaterally, since removal itself can trigger separate legal issues where the artist retains moral rights under Section 80 of the 1988 Act. The lesson from a decade of well-intentioned but poorly documented regeneration work is becoming clear: a handshake deal and a one-off cheque was never a complete answer.