Copyright law changes could mean tens of thousands of images of public places in Europe could have to be deleted from sites like Wikipedia, and your holiday snaps could land you in bother!
Oh, dear, the EU doing itself no favours, again.
In the UK, and most of the EU, you can take photos of public or private buildings and public monuments. I bet it never occurred to you that you couldn’t. It even has a name, “Freedom of Panorama”.
A new EU law would have made this a right across the whole EU, as it is in the UK and most of Europe. But a committee voted to restrict this to “non-commercial” only.
Sounds OK, but the difference between “commercial” and “non-commercial” is really hard to legally define and the distinction on the internet can be impossible to make. For instance, commercial and state schools making uses of the same pictures, your holiday snaps being shared on websites that make money, like Facebook .
If you think this is stupid, contact your MEP and tell them:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/map.html
For the record, it was on 16 June 2015 that the Legal Affairs Committee voted for amendment 421, which would restrict Freedom of Panorama to non-commercial use only.
More background here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Panorama_in_Europe_in_2015/Learn_more
