2016-04-05 1:46 GMT+02:00 Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org:
On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 4:39 PM, Johan Jönsson brevlistor@gmail.com wrote:
2016-04-04 19:44 GMT+02:00 Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org:
[Warning: This is a layman's analysis. I'm not a lawyer.]
Wow, this is a pretty incredible decision. It seems the Swedish Supreme Court has gutted the country's Freedom of Panorama law (for all works including buildings) by simply declaring that the the law's statement that "Works of art may be reproduced..." ("Konstverk får avbildas...") doesn't apply to the internet.
Not necessarily – you're still free to post your vacation pictures on Instagram or Facebook, for example, as I understand it. But for us that's almost irrelevant: if you want to make information about public spaces available to the public, you need to do so in a structured way and they need to be able to easily find it.
The actual conclusion is pretty vague. It basically just says "The way Wikimedia is using these images fails the three-step rule of the EU Directive." It cites several different reasons: that the images are in an "open database", that there is significant commercial value in the database, that no compensation is provided to the authors, and that the right to exploit "new" technology in this way should remain with the authors. It seems unclear whether posting images on Facebook or Flickr would also fail these tests. Has anyone written a thorough legal analysis on the implications?
I should probably have added "but of course, there's a pretty good chance I don't know what I'm talking about" to "as I understand it".
The decision came today, so the legal analysis that exists isn't very thorough, but here's a comment from a Swedish copyright lawyer – former lawyer for the Association of Swedish Photographers – whose interpretation is that it's mainly about databases rather than individual images: http://www.fotosidan.se/cldoc/lag-och-ratt/fotosidans-jurist-om-konsekvenser...
//Johan Jönsson --