[Warning: This is a lawman'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. They seem to have bent over backwards to reach this conclusion, citing the European Parliament and Council Directive 2001/29 / EC of 22 May 2001 (which they say "imposes a strong protection of copyright, especially in the digital environment") and even the fact that other Nordic countries don't have Freedom of Panorama (they do, it's just restricted to buildings). Their basic conclusion is that the law must be interpreted as conservatively as possible because otherwise it would "unreasonably prejudice" the author's financial interests (without acknowledging at all the public's interest). They awkwardly explain that postcards don't constitute a significant impact on commercial exploitation, but when it comes to new technology like the internet, the law must be assumed to not apply (despite what a reasonable person would assume from the law's text). This is very disappointing indeed. On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 8:58 AM, Raul Veede <raul.veede(a)gmail.com> wrote:

[Warning: This is a lawman'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.

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 4:39 PM, Johan Jönsson <brevlistor(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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?

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 6:34 PM, Johan Jönsson <brevlistor(a)gmail.com> wrote: According to that article, it sounds like it mostly depends on how popular your website is, and unfortunately the court didn't offer any suggestions for what constitutes sufficient "economic significance", other than the bizarre claim that postcards don't meet that threshold (although I'm sure that far more money has been made off of Swedish FoP postcards than images from Offentligkonst.se). In the absence of any guidelines, will people want to take the risk of even posting individual images? I'm sure BUS will start threatening to sue anyone who doesn't pay licensing fees regardless, as the lack of clarity certainly plays to their advantage. _______________________________________________ Publicpolicy mailing list Publicpolicy(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/publicpolicy

But it's just to roll up our sleeves and start the legislative fight, I suppose.