[Advocacy Advisors] Legal actions - Freedom of Panorama

[Liam Wyatt]

I cannot give you a good answer to your specific question - I'm sorry, I
don't know of any examples of people actually trying to enforce sanctions
for a FoP violation.

However, I do have a related idea for what might be possible if we get to
the more 'public lobbying' and 'public awareness' stage of fighting for
unified FoP...

On the English wikipedia, we used to have a placeholder-image on biography
page infoboxes without a photo - encouraging people to submit their own
image if they had one. (this practice is now stopped for a variety of
reasons:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_placeholders )

I have often wondered - could we have a similar "placeholder image" on
articles where FoP restricts us from displaying an image? That is, in the
size and location where there SHOULD be an image, we have display a graphic
that says:
"We are not allowed to show you this building, *click here* to learn why"
Clicking the link would take you to a documentation page describing FoP,
what we're fighting for, contact details for the local politician,
whatever...

That way, when the public on the French wikipedia visit "Atomium"
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomium they immediately understand that it
is NOT our fault that we don't have an image of the sculpture, but the
fault of the law.

I realise, it would be both technically and organisationally a little
difficult to achieve this:
- Technically it would require some coding or clever use of categories to
identify which articles should have this placeholder image. Also it would
require technical considerations to decide who receives this message -
perhaps only people visiting the wikipedia article who are in an IP address
from a country without FoP?
- Organisationally, it would require careful negotiation with the relevant
wiki communities to get consensus that this form of overt political
lobbying is acceptable. It would be a similar (but not so drastic) question
to the debate about SOPA.

A simpler idea, of course, would be simply to show a banner, once, to all
non-logged-in readers from European IP addresses, but the organisation
questions would still remain.

I think one of the reasons that FoP is not standard across more countries
is that it is just such an obscure law, and something that most people
would never even imagine has any restrictions on it - "but I just saw a
photo of the Eiffel Tower on Facebook" would be a common reply. Using our
massive visibility (like we did for SOPA) would be a way to get people to
be aware of the problems of the lack of FoP exceptions in a circumstance
that they have personal/direct relationship to. They would see the specific
implications of the law if they were informed that WP is not allowed to
show them a photo of what they just came looking to learn about.


Just an idea...
-Liam


wittylama.com
Peace, love & metadata

On 28 January 2015 at 10:34, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <
dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> things are getting hot here in Brussels (saucy Monitoring Report and spicy
> blog post coming later this week) and we're working on full speed to
> convince decision-makers that FoP is an actual issue.
>
> What would greatly help are any examples of infringement procedures, take
> down notices or someone getting sued because of lack of FoP in a
> jurisdiction. I've - thanks to WMFR - found a few timid examples from
> France, but in general it is still a slim file.
>
> Thanks for thinking hard about this one.
>
> Dimi
>
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