In Europe, you can continue to take selfies at architectural monuments without regard to copyright

A few days ago, the European Parliament considered a proposal according to which authors of selfies and just photos, against which architectural monuments are located, should receive special permission from copyright holders before publishing on the Internet. The overwhelming majority of eurodeputies - 502 people - voted against these amendments. The main role in "lobbying" of this decision was played by Julia Reda , a young politician from the Pirate Party of Germany. She is known for starting a political career at the age of 16, and her main interests are in the reform of copyright laws. She advocates reducing the duration of copyright, changing the principles of working with it for educational purposes, as well as a more transparent relationship between authors of works and publishers.

Two weeks before the vote, Julia Reda posted on her website an article entitled “ Freedom of a panorama under threat .” The Freedom of the Panorama principle adopted by the European Union (Panoramafreiheit) implies that it is possible to photograph and distribute images of buildings, monuments and other noteworthy places that are in public places and are protected by copyright law without restrictions. In the homeland of Julia in Germany, the right to photograph architectural monuments are quite liberal, and in France, for example, it is forbidden to post in the public domain photographs of the Eiffel Tower because of the copyright to its illumination. In this case, the copyright to the images of the tower itself has long expired.

In Russia, the right of “Freedom of the Panorama” is regulated by 1276 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which prohibits the “reproduction” of an architectural object, if “... the image [...] is the main object of this reproduction, broadcast on cable or when the image of the work is used for commercial purposes . Another example of such a restriction is the photographs of the Atomium, one of the symbols of Brussels, a structure representing the beginning of the atomic age of humanity. In 2003, the copyright holders of the Atomium images demanded that his photograph be removed from public access due to the lack of a license: thanks to this, neither this nor the American Wikipedia has his real photograph, and only a reduced model is shown:


^{Wikipedia Photos - Atomium model}