Hello, everybody!
The Senate in Paris just agreed to pass a new exception into French
copyright law. They agreed on the importance of Freedom of Panorama, but
only for non-commercial purposes. The text reads "œuvres en permanence sur
la voie publique réalisées par des particuliers à des fins non lucratives".
A large part of the discussion was revolving around the question whether
"voie publique" and "particuliers" and "non lucrative" are terms that
provide sufficient legal security.
As in Brussels, in Paris it was the visual artists (ADAGP) and Wikimedia
that ran the campaign. The three French architects associations remained
surprinsingly quiet. One major change is the official position of the
French government. Initially they were against any new copyright exception.
Now Minister Lemaire confirmed that the French government had changed its
position and regards the FoP exception favourably in its NC version.
Well, it is not the ultimate win, but we managed to establish an new
copyright exception in France, which is huge. Thanks to Myriam, Nathalie,
Samuel and everyone else at Wikimédia France for running such an efficient
and well coordinated campaign.
The game in Brussels has greatly changed with this, as the main opposing
force was indeed the French government. A possible European solution could
now be to stablish a harmonised minimum FoP while allowing Member States to
go further. An interesting question for us would be if this FoP baseline
could get rid of the antiquity laws.
Cheers,
Dimi