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