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Comment by x0054 | Hacker News Reader

You know, you live your life, blissfully unaware of laws as idiotic as this, and then one day you wake up, read the front page of HN, and now you have yet another thing to feel utterly outraged by. Shouldn't I have absolute right to photograph public spaces.

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Actually, the problem is not so black&white.

For example, in Italy there isn't freedom of panorama. What this means _is not_ that you can't take pictures of St. Peter, it means you need an authorization if you want to sell products based on the image.

Whether this makes sense or not is arguable, but it's not the "right to photograph public places" which is missing.

But you can’t upload those images to facebook, for example. That’s the issue. Neither twitter, Flickr, etc.

yes you can, and you could upload it to wikipedia too, but wikipedia has restrictions against stuff with non-commercial restrictions.

Facebook Terms of use: You give us an unlimited license to use it commercially.

How am I supposed to do that if I don’t even have the ability to give out such licenses?

Wikipedia, too – I can only upload if I have the license for commercial reuse. But with the limited FoP, I don’t.

But St. Peter's is not in Italy?

This makes no sense to me as an American. Copyright is about the right to publish an original work. And buildings aren't published, they are built! They're standing right there!

Maybe if someone was trying to build an exact duplicate of an original building, this would make sense. But if you're photographing a public place, you're not re-"publishing" the building.

Should you? I agree you should be able take pictures of buildings and landmarks, but I'm not sure it's an absolute right.

Here's an example (though a bit contrived) where I don't think that right should (or does) apply: during the recent World Cup, many cities in the US showed the final on large screens at public parks. Are you allowed to take pictures of of the park that contain a portion of FIFA's copyrighted broadcast? How about if you take 29.97 pictures per second of the screen, carefully cropped so you get none of that annoying crowd?

The right should follow the intent, as evidenced by the photograph itself. If the evident intent is to document a public space, than you should have absolute right. But if the intent is to reproduce one particular building or sculpture, or broadcast (in your example), then the authors should have some rights. Though, I thing that any sculpture placed on public property should be in public domain, after all, the public has paid for it, right?

And more importantly, the artist/architect has been paid for their work.

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.

No. Who paid for the statue of liberty? People donate monuments to public areas all the time.

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

The problem is defining intent in legislation has proven to be notoriously hard. Did the framers of the U.S. constitution intend to allow gay marriage? Or did they intend to allow equal rights for 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.

If FIFA licenses their event to be broadcast in public, then as far as I care they haven't sufficiently protected the broadcast. They can't sufficiently control what happens in the crowd, not consistent with other rights which are superior; and, at least for that particular instance, anyone ought to be able to record it with their phone or whatever. That may not be what the law says, but that's the law according to me today.

What problem are you trying to solve? Preventing the rebroadcast of a live event to an area where FIFA has secured exclusive distribution rights?

>Here's an example (though a bit contrived) where I don't think that right should (or does) apply: during the recent World Cup, many cities in the US showed the final on large screens at public parks. Are you allowed to take pictures of of the park that contain a portion of FIFA's copyrighted broadcast? How about if you take 29.97 pictures per second of the screen, carefully cropped so you get none of that annoying crowd?

Absolutely. They should either make their "broadcasts" photographable or keep their commercial BS out of the streets.

As for taking 29.97 pictures per second and cropping them, that's entirely another issue, and should be dealt with the end result and intention in mind.

The law should be based on how humans actually behave, not tortured theoretical outliers that rarely happen. The law is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel, and should not be based around extreme outliers.

Copyrights aren't natural rights, they are limited government monopolies created for the purpose of encouraging creative and commercial activity. They make sense in publishing because it is easy for other publishers to pirate and profit from original work.

But is it actually the case that the copying of architectural designs—that is, the exact reproduction of original buildings—is such a big problem in Europe that this kind of government intervention is necessary?

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