Another ‘Permission Culture’ Landmine

From our friends at Techdirt comes this insane story about yet another copyright landmine we all need to be worrying about falling into: the ‘freedom of panorama’ principle. As Tim Cushing explains:

"Photographing public structures could soon become copyright infringement. At this point, there’s no unified "freedom of panorama" across European countries. Some recognize this as a right inherent to citizens. Others feel any photographic reproductions of structures in public spaces are a violation of the creators’ rights."

Cushing goes on to comprehensively detail the ramifications a potential copyright reform to this law would have, including restricting the use of historical photographs on Wikipedia. But for me, this is more a personal freedom issue. We have all heard stories before about police officers stopping people who are photographing near a security barrier or a public event. Imagine if they actually had a legal justification for doing so?

And I think that when you start getting into ‘commercial use’ vs personal use, that can be a slippery slope. I recently photographed a young family member outside an iconic sign for a local tourist attraction, because we were visiting. I plan to put the photo in our personal photo album, which I make via Apple’s iPhoto service. Does their involvement make my photo a commercial use? What about if I share the photo on Facebook? What about it my parents take the photo off of Facebook and order a print of it, or put it on a mug or something? Am I ‘publicly exhibiting’ the sign and therefore need to pay a royalty?

I think common sense needs to prevail here. The museum can prevent me from bringing my camera into the actual museum gallery, sure. They could even—maybe—prevent me from writing a book about the architecture of the building without consulting them. But I don’t think they should be able to prevent me from walking by with a camera and taking a snapshot. I think that the countries who do have ‘freedom of panorama’ already enshrined have it right: if it’s out there in public where anybody can see it, anybody can take a picture of it too.