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Comment by phkn1 | Hacker News Reader

Under this interpretation, wouldn't (say) a collection of Facebook photos with statues, in aggregate, constitute a database and therefore become illegal? At what point does the size and structure of a collection become sufficient to cross the legal line? Would an individual Facebook user therefore be liable? Would Facebook as whole? etc.

It seems that the law has created the unintended consequence that the organization of the depictions in question matter more than the actual depictions themselves. Or in other words, of imputing commercial intent to any such collection of copyrighted works, whether intentional or otherwise.

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Maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but it sounds like there's no problem since Facebook is a commercial enterprise. The problem is when a nonprofit does it. (Which seems... wrongheaded, to basically ban nonprofit websites from competing with for-profit ones.)

Wrongheaded is a polite way to put it.

Do I have this straight?

Publishers are allowed to make guidebooks and sell postcards without permission and also without recompense for the artists.

Historians and critics are allowed to include the photos in books without permission.

For-profit corporations are allowed to use the photos as long as they don't collect them into a single database marked "highly dangerous public database of art photographs".

But nonprofits who create a digital guidebook are copyright criminals - with the implication that they're not allowed to distribute the work for free, because it might affect the profitability of a hypothetical not-yet-existent commercial alternative.

I'd hope a good lawyer could sail a battleship through that line of argument. It's clearly prejudicial, discriminatory, inconsistent, arbitrary, and not in the interests of either the public or the copyright holders.

I suspect if it gets taken to the EU Courts, it will be shot down in flames in short order.

Court is fine, but in the meantime, I'd just find a loophole.

E.g. it might be ok to take a picture of each piece of art with a person standing in front of it, so retake the pictures or just superimpose a picture of a person with a transparent background onto each picture.

Then once you've found that loophole, exploit the heck of it and sell prints on the street with that person superimposed on the art. Just give a big middle finger to the law.

You might be surprised. In the end, Google got fined in France because Google Maps was competing with paid maps, and if you think about it, google maps is just a depiction of land, it's all publicly available information. But they got fined because their free product was making commercial ones impossible or very hard to sell.

As I understood it, the way they formulated the ruling says that it only becomes a problem when it reaches "commercial proportion", or "commercial value". According to the ruling it would be illegal for Facebook to do a similar database, the difference here being that Facebook is not creating such a database, and afaik no single Facebook user has attempted it either.

However I'm interested in what the case is with Google Ingress and their effort to make public art etc. more accessible through a smartphone-game using GPS and images.

Furthermore, yes, this is all madness.

Facebook already is one fricking giant database because it's searchable. Go ahead, try searching for "Branting Monument" on Facebook, it's a statue in Sweden.

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