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?