

European Parliament rejects EU plan to axe Freedom of Panorama - nsns
http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo-news/european-parliament-rejects-absurd-eu-plan-to-axe-freedom-of-panorama-55708

======
phaemon
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
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
WHAT? You can't take a picture of a public place in France and own (or
release) the copyright?

~~~
rhblake
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_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama#European_Union)

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

~~~
panglott
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.

------
eCa
> "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.

------
alttt
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.

~~~
jkldotio
>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
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".

~~~
jkldotio
Titles are titles: they need to be short and are only an indication of the
content, not a full summary. I don't know where anyone is getting the idea
that the title can always be perfect summary from. Some degree of ambiguity is
therefore almost always given if you only have one, short, sentence to act as
a title.

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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg)

~~~
fineman
Your bitching is longer than what you're bitching about. That's the cancer.

And no, it's not pointless definitional games, the title is intentionally
totally wrong. Black vs white. It's not like it's mostly right but not quite,
it's almost as wrong as it's possible to be and still be using words. And it's
not about pointing out mistakes, it's about calling out pointless clickbait to
get it flagged and telling people how to spot it next time. You for one seem
to think it's an honest mistake and a good article.

> People roaring about their ignorance and [...]

Oh, you don't say. Do they go on and on? Cluelessly unaware that everyone is
looking at them? Wow.

~~~
jkldotio
>And no, it's not pointless definitional games

Actually it pretty much is exactly that. You clearly didn't read the article
or don't care about the article and only care about the headline. You aren't
even discussing the article or the moral and legal points discussed within it,
you are literally just concerned with the headline.

>the title is intentionally totally wrong. Black vs white.

The title isn't really a bad description of the article at all so to call it
"totally wrong" is false. To call it "intentionally totally wrong" is, well,
even more false.

>It's not like it's mostly right but not quite, it's almost as wrong as it's
possible to be and still be using words.

I can't believe you'd actually seriously claim this, the title might be
slightly ambiguous but to call it "as wrong as it's possible to be" is
unequivocally a lie. The title in no way is "as wrong as it's possible to be".
Are you a native speaker of English? I am not sure it's possible to make the
statements you have made, at least in good faith, whilst being a native
speaker. You have to be either a troll or a non-native speaker, with ants in
your pants over something to do with the EU, because there is no other
reasonable explanation for your wild claims. "European Parliament rejects EU
plan to axe Freedom of Panorama" is simply not, as a title, "almost as wrong
as it's possible to be and still be using words". Game over.

~~~
fineman
NO!!! You can't end the game! No!

> The title isn't really a bad description of the article at all so to call it
> "totally wrong" is false.

Totally wrong. It implies things were decided, and that they were overruled,
and that there were multiple bodies involved.

What really happened? A bill was proposed and voted against.

> To call it "intentionally totally wrong" is, well, even more false.

Yeah, nobody would ever write an intentionally misleading title for clickbait.

------
x0054
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
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
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
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.

------
deif
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
Cause they are used to the American democracy.

------
jfoster
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?

------
Apocryphon
See, democracy can and does work.

~~~
coldtea
Well, I wouldn't associate the European Parliament with democracy that
strongly.

~~~
arrrg
_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
> _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.

~~~
arrrg
You are, again, confusing the issue, throwing in council and commission to the
parliament.

Also, some staunch nationalism. Yuck. Disgusting.

------
mmanfrin
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?

------
nsns
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
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_.

