Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

This seems completely irrelevant. Photo cameras don't instristically rely on painters having existed and continuing to exist to do their thing.

View on HN

Counter example:

Cameras often do rely on other professions to have existed to do their thing.

e.g. Architects who built city buildings, fashion designers who designed clothes, and engineers who built cars.

They don’t get paid every time their work gets put on Instagram, etc.

I don't know how it is in other countries but in general in France you cannot just take a picture of a building and put it on Instagram without asking the architect for rights :

> the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitutes, according to the provisions of the article L122-4 of the Code of the intellectual property an act of counterfeit.

I read some year ago that this kind of thing applies to New York as well, that was in the context of an open-world Spider-Man game featuring NY skylines.

France must get a lot of money from all the photos of the Eiffel Tower on the internet. Has anyone been sued/convicted of breaking that and paid reparations?

Fun fact, the Eiffel Tower architecture is not protected since 1990, but the lighting is. So it's illegal to use commercialy a night time photo of the tower[1][2].

I don't think anybody has ever been sued but the SETE (Société d'exploitation de la tour Eiffel) do make money with the image.

[1] https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Illumination_copy...

I wonder how they deal with real estate pictures. Do most people get a license to reproduce the images of their house when they buy it?

Interesting I hadn’t heard of that!

Is this law often enforced?

This is a separate (but important) issue. The development and effect that tech like this will have on the place of the artist or designer in the future is going to be a similarly seismic shift for the industry, just as the camera and printing press were in their time. This is going to happen more-or-less regardless of what the outcome of the copyright issue is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com