7 ms·

European Parliament rejects EU plan to axe Freedom of Panorama

117 points by nsns 11y ago

phaemon 11y ago
In case you're trying to fight your way through the double negatives, this means they're keeping Freedom of Panaroma (which is good).
- programLyrique 11y ago
  More precisely, members of the EU will continue to have their own law about Freedom of Panorama. For instance, there is not freedom of panorama in France, while it is absolute in the UK, and there are some restrictions in Germany.
  - outside1234 11y ago
    WHAT? You can't take a picture of a public place in France and own (or release) the copyright?
    - rhblake 11y ago
      Depends. In France, a building can in itself be copyrighted, meaning you'd technially need permission from the "author" to publish a picture of it, unless the copyright has expired. [0] 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_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama#European_U... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Image_copyright_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Image_copyright_c...
      - panglott 11y ago
        Wow, I did not think that copyright law could get worse than in the United States. Thinking in US terms, it sounds like the argument that if you take a picture of your kids with a building in the background, the picture is a derivative work of the building's architect. Madness.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- StavrosK 11y ago
  You mean they're not stopping not supporting its non-existence?!
  - function_seven 11y ago
    Not exactly
x0054 11y ago
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.
- ecopoesis 11y ago
  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?
  - x0054 11y ago
    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?
    - themartorana 11y ago
      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.
eCa 11y ago
> "We must now continue to fight for an extension of important copyright exceptions such as this one to all member states." Good! > Cavada wanted all European nations to adopt laws that may require permission from a building's architect before an image is published commercially. I would like a list of architechts supporting such a law. They deserve all photographs (and mentions) of their buildings to be removed from the internet.
Apocryphon 11y ago
See, democracy can and does work.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Well, I wouldn't associate the European Parliament with democracy that strongly.
  - arrrg 11y ago
    What? The European parliament is the clearest example of a democratic institution inside the EU. Commission and council have their elements of redirection, sure (i.e. it’s people appointed by people who were democratically elected … though in the case of someone like Angela Merkel, herself elected by the German parliament, it’s more like people appointed by people appointed by people who were democratically elected). Even though, they are still democratic, certainly, but redirection and delegation is a problem for democratic participation. However, the European parliament does only consist of actually elected members. It doesn’t suffer from any of the problems other EU institutions may suffer from. You statement belies a clear misunderstanding of how EU institutions actually function. Please get off populist train and get an understanding of the actual issues involved when it comes to democracy and democratic processes inside the EU. I, for example, want the EU parliament to get much, much more power compared to other European institutions, mostly because it certainly is the single most democratic EU institutions. (But status quo is powerful … and the EU did grow out of more traditional bilateral and multilateral international agreements and treaties. Those things have always been run by heads of governments or people appointed by heads of governments. That history is hard to shake for the EU … and that is exactly why that model of heads of governments or someone appointed by them coming together and hashing it out is still sadly such an important element of EU governance. However, with too many EU skeptics a truly democratic EU government that is truly independent from heads of governments of nation states will certainly never be possible.)
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >What? The European parliament is the clearest example of a democratic institution inside the EU 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.
deif 11y ago
Unsurprisingly the EU made a sensible ruling. Just like most of the rulings they've made in the past 10 years. I'm not sure why the media and social justice groups got so worked up over it as it was in the minority anyway. It's called a democracy for a reason - you've got to have fair representation from all angles, not just the most sensible. People are getting mightily agitated every time a strange law is brought to the table recently. I blame Twitter. /s
- callesgg 11y ago
  Cause they are used to the American democracy.
- callesgg 11y ago
  Cause they are used to the piles and piles of stupid laws that gets passed all the time.
alttt 11y ago
This is one of the most uninformed titles I've read. There were no eu (commission or council) plans to kill freedom of panorama. The liberals inside the European parliament proposed it in one committee, the liberals, conservatives, right wing and socialists voted in favour of it (green and left against) in the committee and it passed. Now in the plenary, after sufficient backlash, socialists and some liberals have changed their opinion, thus an amendment introduced in a committee was slashed in three plenary. All that happened in the parliament, not in a mysterious other EU.
- coldtea 11y ago
  In what way does the European Parliament does not qualify as "EU"? In any case, it wasn't the national governments that voted for it. (Especially since the Parliament is mostly a fig leaf for the Council and Commission, but I digress).
  - matthewowen 11y ago
    I think the point he's making is that it isn't as though the European Parliament is "standing up against" the EU or whatever: the parliament is part of the EU; you could rewrite the headline as "EU rejects EU plan". That view may not fully capture the subtlety of the matter though.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  >This is one of the most uninformed titles I've read. Well then perhaps you should read the article. Yours is a classic HN pedant response where some minor technical issue, which frequently isn't even an issue, becomes a fixation. You are taking issue with a minor ambiguity in the headline which is clarified by reading the article. I wish people would stop these type of comments, they are the commentator's equivalent of a journalist's "gotcha" based on not letting the person being interviewed complete what they were saying and/or selectively editing.
  - fineman 11y ago
    No, they're right. The title mislead me. The title suggests the EU decided something. Done. And then some European parliament came in and vetoed it. wtf? Instead, a correct title would seem to be "European parliament strongly rejected proposal to axe 'freedom of panorama' across the EU"...? The difference being "EU members' plan" vs "plan for the EU".
nsns 11y ago
For anyone thinking this is stupid, it's actually a pointer to a very important change in the power structure of the world: "Occupation of the Kasbah in Tunis and of the Syntagma Square in Athens, siege of Westminster in London during the student movement of 2011, encirclement of the parliament in Madrid on September 25, 2012 or in Barcelona on June 15, 2011, riots all around the Chamber of Deputies in Rome on December 14, 2010, attempt on October 15, 2011 in Lisbon to invade the Assembleia da Republica, burning of the Bosnian presidential residence in February of 2014: the places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the 'people' from 'taking power' that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush onto the stage to find out what is happening in the wings is bound to be disappointed. If they got inside, even the most fervent conspiracy freaks would find nothing arcane there; the truth is that power is simply no longer that theatrical reality to which modernity accustomed us. [...] But what is it that appears on euro banknotes? Not human figures, not emblems of a personal sovereignty, but bridges, aqueducts, arches—pieces of impersonal architecture, cold as stone. As to the truth about the present nature of power, every European has a printed exemplar of it in their pocket. It can be stated in this way: power now resides in the infrastructures of this world. Contemporary power is of an architectural and impersonal, and not a representative or personal, nature." (Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, Semiotext(e) 2014)
- icebraining 11y ago
  The fact that they aren't changing the law is a sign? By the way, for what it's worth, there was no attempt in 2001 to invade the Assembleia in Lisbon. There was a large demonstration, during which a commotion forced the police line to back up a little, nothing more. Curiously, the time where there really was a deliberate (and successful) attempt to break the police barrier (though they stopped before entering the Assembleia) was during a demonstration by other cops.
mmanfrin 11y ago
I read the title and was very confused, surely there must be some sort of bill or law or something called 'Panorama', because the only thing I can think of by that name is taking a long picture. And then I read the article, and it truly referenced pictures. What idiot thought legislating fucking long pictures was a good idea?
jfoster 11y ago
It seems silly for architects to even want this. They would be undermining themselves! Would the Eiffel Tower be nearly as famous as it is if only approved/licensed photographers were allowed to photograph it? Would I even care who Frank Gehry is if photos of his buildings were not appearing in my Facebook feed and findable on Google, Wikipedia, etcetera? Is not getting your building "out there," as widely as possible, a success metric for an architect?

117 points by nsns 11y ago

In case you're trying to fight your way through the double negatives, this means they're keeping Freedom of Panaroma (which is good).

programLyrique 11y ago
More precisely, members of the EU will continue to have their own law about Freedom of Panorama. For instance, there is not freedom of panorama in France, while it is absolute in the UK, and there are some restrictions in Germany.
- outside1234 11y ago
  WHAT? You can't take a picture of a public place in France and own (or release) the copyright?
  - rhblake 11y ago
    Depends. In France, a building can in itself be copyrighted, meaning you'd technially need permission from the "author" to publish a picture of it, unless the copyright has expired. [0] 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_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama#European_U... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Image_copyright_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Image_copyright_c...
    - panglott 11y ago
      Wow, I did not think that copyright law could get worse than in the United States. Thinking in US terms, it sounds like the argument that if you take a picture of your kids with a building in the background, the picture is a derivative work of the building's architect. Madness.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
StavrosK 11y ago
You mean they're not stopping not supporting its non-existence?!
- function_seven 11y ago
  Not exactly

x0054 11y ago

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.

ecopoesis 11y ago
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?
- x0054 11y ago
  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?
  - themartorana 11y ago
    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.

eCa 11y ago

> "We must now continue to fight for an extension of important copyright exceptions such as this one to all member states." Good! > Cavada wanted all European nations to adopt laws that may require permission from a building's architect before an image is published commercially. I would like a list of architechts supporting such a law. They deserve all photographs (and mentions) of their buildings to be removed from the internet.

Apocryphon 11y ago

See, democracy can and does work.

coldtea 11y ago
Well, I wouldn't associate the European Parliament with democracy that strongly.
- arrrg 11y ago
  What? The European parliament is the clearest example of a democratic institution inside the EU. Commission and council have their elements of redirection, sure (i.e. it’s people appointed by people who were democratically elected … though in the case of someone like Angela Merkel, herself elected by the German parliament, it’s more like people appointed by people appointed by people who were democratically elected). Even though, they are still democratic, certainly, but redirection and delegation is a problem for democratic participation. However, the European parliament does only consist of actually elected members. It doesn’t suffer from any of the problems other EU institutions may suffer from. You statement belies a clear misunderstanding of how EU institutions actually function. Please get off populist train and get an understanding of the actual issues involved when it comes to democracy and democratic processes inside the EU. I, for example, want the EU parliament to get much, much more power compared to other European institutions, mostly because it certainly is the single most democratic EU institutions. (But status quo is powerful … and the EU did grow out of more traditional bilateral and multilateral international agreements and treaties. Those things have always been run by heads of governments or people appointed by heads of governments. That history is hard to shake for the EU … and that is exactly why that model of heads of governments or someone appointed by them coming together and hashing it out is still sadly such an important element of EU governance. However, with too many EU skeptics a truly democratic EU government that is truly independent from heads of governments of nation states will certainly never be possible.)
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >What? The European parliament is the clearest example of a democratic institution inside the EU 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.

deif 11y ago

Unsurprisingly the EU made a sensible ruling. Just like most of the rulings they've made in the past 10 years. I'm not sure why the media and social justice groups got so worked up over it as it was in the minority anyway. It's called a democracy for a reason - you've got to have fair representation from all angles, not just the most sensible. People are getting mightily agitated every time a strange law is brought to the table recently. I blame Twitter. /s

callesgg 11y ago
Cause they are used to the American democracy.
callesgg 11y ago
Cause they are used to the piles and piles of stupid laws that gets passed all the time.

alttt 11y ago

This is one of the most uninformed titles I've read. There were no eu (commission or council) plans to kill freedom of panorama. The liberals inside the European parliament proposed it in one committee, the liberals, conservatives, right wing and socialists voted in favour of it (green and left against) in the committee and it passed. Now in the plenary, after sufficient backlash, socialists and some liberals have changed their opinion, thus an amendment introduced in a committee was slashed in three plenary. All that happened in the parliament, not in a mysterious other EU.

coldtea 11y ago
In what way does the European Parliament does not qualify as "EU"? In any case, it wasn't the national governments that voted for it. (Especially since the Parliament is mostly a fig leaf for the Council and Commission, but I digress).
- matthewowen 11y ago
  I think the point he's making is that it isn't as though the European Parliament is "standing up against" the EU or whatever: the parliament is part of the EU; you could rewrite the headline as "EU rejects EU plan". That view may not fully capture the subtlety of the matter though.
jkldotio 11y ago
>This is one of the most uninformed titles I've read. Well then perhaps you should read the article. Yours is a classic HN pedant response where some minor technical issue, which frequently isn't even an issue, becomes a fixation. You are taking issue with a minor ambiguity in the headline which is clarified by reading the article. I wish people would stop these type of comments, they are the commentator's equivalent of a journalist's "gotcha" based on not letting the person being interviewed complete what they were saying and/or selectively editing.
- fineman 11y ago
  No, they're right. The title mislead me. The title suggests the EU decided something. Done. And then some European parliament came in and vetoed it. wtf? Instead, a correct title would seem to be "European parliament strongly rejected proposal to axe 'freedom of panorama' across the EU"...? The difference being "EU members' plan" vs "plan for the EU".

nsns 11y ago

For anyone thinking this is stupid, it's actually a pointer to a very important change in the power structure of the world: "Occupation of the Kasbah in Tunis and of the Syntagma Square in Athens, siege of Westminster in London during the student movement of 2011, encirclement of the parliament in Madrid on September 25, 2012 or in Barcelona on June 15, 2011, riots all around the Chamber of Deputies in Rome on December 14, 2010, attempt on October 15, 2011 in Lisbon to invade the Assembleia da Republica, burning of the Bosnian presidential residence in February of 2014: the places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the 'people' from 'taking power' that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush onto the stage to find out what is happening in the wings is bound to be disappointed. If they got inside, even the most fervent conspiracy freaks would find nothing arcane there; the truth is that power is simply no longer that theatrical reality to which modernity accustomed us. [...] But what is it that appears on euro banknotes? Not human figures, not emblems of a personal sovereignty, but bridges, aqueducts, arches—pieces of impersonal architecture, cold as stone. As to the truth about the present nature of power, every European has a printed exemplar of it in their pocket. It can be stated in this way: power now resides in the infrastructures of this world. Contemporary power is of an architectural and impersonal, and not a representative or personal, nature." (Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, Semiotext(e) 2014)

icebraining 11y ago
The fact that they aren't changing the law is a sign? By the way, for what it's worth, there was no attempt in 2001 to invade the Assembleia in Lisbon. There was a large demonstration, during which a commotion forced the police line to back up a little, nothing more. Curiously, the time where there really was a deliberate (and successful) attempt to break the police barrier (though they stopped before entering the Assembleia) was during a demonstration by other cops.

mmanfrin 11y ago

I read the title and was very confused, surely there must be some sort of bill or law or something called 'Panorama', because the only thing I can think of by that name is taking a long picture. And then I read the article, and it truly referenced pictures. What idiot thought legislating fucking long pictures was a good idea?

jfoster 11y ago

It seems silly for architects to even want this. They would be undermining themselves! Would the Eiffel Tower be nearly as famous as it is if only approved/licensed photographers were allowed to photograph it? Would I even care who Frank Gehry is if photos of his buildings were not appearing in my Facebook feed and findable on Google, Wikipedia, etcetera? Is not getting your building "out there," as widely as possible, a success metric for an architect?