European Parliament rejects EU plan to axe Freedom of Panorama

Here's a funny one: in France, the Eiffel Tower copyright has expired; however, courts have deemed that the lighting display on the tower is a protected work, still copyrighted. Meaning you are allowed to publish pictures of the Eiffel Tower taken at day, but not at night -- unless you have permission. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama#European_U...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Image_copyright_c...

It follows from this that out of tens of thousands of readers there will always be a few, perhaps even quite a few, for whom a title doesn't serve as a completely perfect summary. But rather than clogging up huge numbers of comment threads with completely pointless pedantry why don't you just read the actual article?

I suppose I wouldn't complain so much if completely pointless interjections such as yours and the original one I responded to were at the bottom of the comment threads, but they are frequently at the top. It's IMO a total cancer on HN comment threads because it adds no value to have someone splitting pointless definitional hairs (not refuting a central point via a definitional argument as per PG's hierarchy of disagreement[0]) as the first comment. People roaring about their ignorance and apparent incapacity to read the actual article doesn't help any debate.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...

And I'm certain that title would just be edited back to the original title by the pedant moderators.

Sorry, but you can't win this one.

I have this conversation with artists sometimes. If I buy a print, yes, you retain copyright, but I expect an exemption when I post a picture of my print on Facebook, hanging in my living room. On the other hand, many artists want to retain the copyright of an original I purchase - which I usually disagree with. I can offer an exemption to my copyright which I purchase with the work that allows you to continue to sell prints. But if I'm going to pay a hefty price for an original work of art (or architecture) I expect to own it, copyright and all.

How about the 2nd amendment? Did they founders intent for folks to own machine guns?

My point was that calling anything an "absolute right" is problematic. Absolute allows no opportunity to assess intent, and the intent of a right of panorama is obviously not to allow rebroadcasting of soccer matches.

But the public owns it, so yes, it should be public domain.

Which is not saying much.

I won't get to the debate of the actual democratic quality of what we call "parliamentary democracy" and the culture of the passive once-at-4/5-years voting it encourages.

Even taking that as granted and democractic (e.g. accepting the same crap we get as democracy at the national level), in the EU most of the power still resides on the bureacrats, the commission and the council.

Then, even if we also sidestep the issue of the E.P. being a "fig leaf" for an undemocratic self-replicating bureaucracy, it also exhibits issues of "representation at scale", where decisions affecting the national level are taken by a parliament based thousands of miles away, whose proceedings are seldom covered by national media, with political alliances, connections and power plays, far away from the everyday life of citizens of members states, and trying to find a middle ground among tens of member states with differing economies, outlooks on politics, etc -- in which large, powerful, states, also buy more influence than their population count.