Techdirt: MEP Cavada doesn’t want you to share your photos for free

The so called freedom of panorama was included in MEP Julia Reda's copyright report, but a troubling amendment voted it out. Speak out now to push back against those powerful interests who want to restrict and censor our right to link online: SaveTheLink.org Article by Glynn Moody for Techdirt

Last week, Tim Cushing explained that one of the bad outcomes of the recent European Parliament committee vote on Julia Reda's copyright reform report was that it recommended limiting freedom of panorama -- the ability to take pictures and make videos of public objects -- to non-commercial use. As Techdirt readers know, in the digital age, it is very hard to draw a clear distinction between commercial and non-commercial contexts online, which makes any kind of limitation to non-commercial use problematic. The person responsible for introducing the amendment to Reda's report, Jean-Marie Cavada, has written a blog post about the freedom of panorama issue (original in French), and it gives us some interesting insights into his thinking here:

The fight which is being led today by Ms. Reda, in the guise of defending free access to the works that are in the public domain [public objects] on behalf of users, is actually one conducted above all to allow US monopolies such as Facebook, or Wikimedia, to avoid the payment of fees to the creators.

Yes, it's all about those evil American companies again, refusing to pay when somebody dares to post a holiday picture on their Facebook page. Because, as the copyright maximalists keep on reminding us, every single use of every single owned object must be licensed every single time, otherwise civilization -- specifically European civilization -- will come crashing down.

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