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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

OK, seems like a storm in a teacup. The items covered by this ruling ('industrially exploited artistic works') are artistic items that have been reproduced more than 50 times. They are already under copyright for 25 years, but due to a judicial review based on EU law, that section has been repealed so they are now covered by the same copyright as 2D artistic works (such as paintings).

Therefore, it's not everything that I own, but only items that a court would consider to be a work of art. Since Apple would have a hard time convincing a court that their laptops are first and foremost works of art, this will have no effect on my ability to run a blog featuring photos of Apple laptops. However, if I wanted to sell a book featuring photos of Busk and Hertzog chairs, I would now need to wait for 70 years instead of 25.

IANAL, but I really don't think this is a big issue.

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Unless one of your user submitted photos of an Apple laptop happens to contain their desk chair that you don't notice is a designer chair. The first you may know about this is the copyright troll that purchased the rights to images of that chair sending you a speculative invoice after their chair recognising bot has trawled your blog. You might when you reflect on this hazard decide that your blog on Apple laptops is not worth the risk. This is an example of a chilling effect.

My understanding of the current protections (of 2D works) is that the photograph has to be an image of the protected object. A photo of an Apple laptop with a desk chair in the background isn't a photo of the desk chair. Similarly, a photo of an art gallery isn't a photo of every piece of art contained therein.

Good. However, it will be for the publisher of the photo to argue this with the copyright troll (and possibly eventually in court). In particular I guess that they will probably have to demonstrate that the chair is background and not a significant part of the image. I guess that the publisher will win eventually. I personally don't want to be the test case though.

>but only items that a court would consider to be a work of art.

This doesn't handle the issue of people making claims that things are works of art even if the courts would not agree. Add in the cost to fight it and you end up with a chilling effect.

For example, it would be possible for some laptop design company to say that while the guts of the laptop are not primarily a work of art, the case that holds them is. Maybe they would lose in court, but what is the chance that you would be willing to fight them instead of just taking down the blog?

So if I understand what you're saying, it's that since there is no legal definition of art, I could call anything art if I wanted to prevent people taking photos of it. People would be afraid of the court fees, so they would just roll over. Is that a fair summary of your argument?

I think you're right that this could happen, but this line of thought can lead you to doing nothing about anything due to the way it might be abused in the future. In this specific case, I don't understand what specific problem the law is trying to solve so I can't balance the positive and negative effects of the law against each other. However, it does seem to me a narrowly focused law with a reasonable definition of the subject.

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