{"id":2232,"date":"2016-04-04T02:53:57","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T09:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/?p=2232"},"modified":"2024-01-29T09:23:16","modified_gmt":"2024-01-29T17:23:16","slug":"supreme-court-wikipedia-violates-copyright-posting-photos-public-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/supreme-court-wikipedia-violates-copyright-posting-photos-public-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court: Wikimedia violates copyright by posting its own photos of public, taxpayer-funded art"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>A ruling in the Swedish Supreme Court today establishes that Wikimedia, the publisher of Wikipedia, must pay compensation to the creators of original sculptures and monuments when publishing Wikimedia\u2019s own photos of said sculptures and monuments. Note that this isn\u2019t about using photos without permission; the photos are used with permission. It\u2019s the fact that the photos depict public \u2013 and taxpayer-funded \u2013 art. This is the Freedom of Panorama gone wrong, and shows just one facet of the copyright regime\u2019s utter brokenness.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The verdict (in Swedish, full verdict here) establishes that people have a right to take photos of public art for personal use, and to distribute those in limited scope, but only in a <em>non-digital<\/em> form (yes, really, I\u2019m not making this up).<\/p>\n<p>The Supreme Court rules that a \u201cpublic database\u201d such as Wikipedia \u2013 or in this case, the specialized Wikimedia site <a href=\"https:\/\/www.offentligkonst.se\/\"><em>offentligkonst.se<\/em><\/a> (a name meaning \u201cpublic art\u201d) \u2013 is different from personal use, and that a database of public art and monuments has a significant commercial value, and that this value belongs to the original creators. It is of no significance whether the site is actually commercial or not.<\/p>\n<p>The Supreme Court concludes that Wikimedia, according to copyright monopoly law, is not permitted to publish photos of public art \u2013 photos where the photographer has explicitly permitted Wikimedia to publish them \u2013 without permission of the creators of the original monuments.<\/p>\n<p><strong>This ruling has a very large number of very large problems. Let\u2019s take a few of them.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>First, this is about public art. The Supreme Court is essentially ruling that somebody owns the image depicted onto your retina via reflected photons, or onto an electronic equivalent of your retina. There was a huge fight about this in Europe concerning the so-called <a href=\"https:\/\/felixreda.eu\/copyright-evaluation-report\/\">Reda report<\/a> last year, which evaluated what works and doesn\u2019t in the European copyright monopoly. Julia Reda, the author of the report, wanted a clear and unambiguous Freedom of Panorama to apply across Europe \u2013 you should have a clear right to take and publish any photo. Offline-born dinosaurs fought back, and the freedom was eventually struck from the report. Therefore, this ruling cannot be appealed \u2013 there is no European-wide harmonization of Freedom of Panorama.<\/p>\n<p>Second, this goes against every grain of common sense for the net generation.<\/p>\n<p>Third, literally having different laws for analog and digital transmission of art is asinine, especially when digital has <em>less<\/em> protection for freedoms of speech and expression.<\/p>\n<p>Fourth, even if none of the above points were true, the original art is still taxpayer-funded. The public has already paid for the construction and placement of the art in question when commissioning an artist to create the sculpture, monument, et cetera. To deny the public a right to snap a photo of something the same public has already paid for is revolting bordering on legal corruption.<\/p>\n<p>Expect this ruling to have far-reaching implications for Wikipedia\u2019s operations \u2013 and its presence in Sweden and Europe.<\/p>\n<p>CLARIFICATION: This is posted on April 4. It\u2019s not a slightly old April Fool\u2019s joke. It\u2019s too dumb to be a funny April Fool\u2019s joke, anyway.<\/p>\n<p><small><em>(Hat tip: <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/saragoldberger\/status\/716909390020939776\">Sara Goldberger<\/a>)<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A ruling in the Swedish Supreme Court today establishes that Wikimedia, the publisher of Wikipedia, must pay compensation to the creators of original sculptures and monuments when publishing Wikimedia\u2019s own photos of said sculptures and monuments. Note that this isn\u2019t about using photos without permission; the photos are used with permission. It\u2019s the fact that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/supreme-court-wikipedia-violates-copyright-posting-photos-public-art\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Supreme Court: Wikimedia violates copyright by posting its own photos of public, taxpayer-funded art&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":true,"_modified_date":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[250,1],"tags":[1195],"class_list":["post-2232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright","category-news","tag-torrenting"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.9 (Yoast SEO v26.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Supreme Court: Wikimedia violates copyright by posting its 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