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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Atomium, Copyrightium, Let's Call the Whole Thing Absurdium
Francis Deblauwe · Saratoga, CA (United States) · May 29th, 2008 7:30 pm · 36 votes · no comments made
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| Atomium, Brussels, Belgium, by amanito |
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March 2007 tourist video of Brussels: Atomium segment starts at 13'33'' |
by Diego Baraldi |
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Snapshots of Belgian landmark building require copyright clearance
Have you ever been to Belgium, more in particular the capital, Brussels? Surely you took a stroll around the Grand Place (the Medieval market square and a UNESCO World Heritage site) and chuckled at the nearby Manneken Pis (statue of a little boy peeing - I kid you not!). The next most visited tourist attraction is the Atomium, built for the World Expo in 1958. The iconic structure, representing an iron crystal, was recently given a makeover for its 50th birthday. It was designed by the architect André Waterkeyn and stands over a hundred meters tall. With its nine metal spheres connected by giant tubes equipped with escalators, it was an immediate hit. Through the years, it has been featured on bank notes, coins, postage stamps and more. On Flickr alone, you can find over 17,000 results for a search on "Atomium." Google has about 89,300 images and over 600 videos - in other words, depictions of the Atomium are everywhere.
When the city of Mechelen near Brussels planned an exhibition commemorating the 1958 World Fair, it found out that it is actually not allowed to use pictures of the Atomium, about the only remaining structure of that Fair, without getting permission from the heirs to the architect. A section of the Mechelen exhibition was supposed to display snapshots taken by World Fair visitors. Naturally, the Atomium appeared in a great many pictures. Paying the royalties for all these photos would be prohibitive, so instead a tongue-in-cheek appeal was issued for 100 "Photoshoppers" to digitally edit out all Atomiums. However, even such draconian measures weren't sufficient as lawyers claimed that even the silhouette of the famous landmark was copyrighted for 70 years after the death of its "author" - that would be 2075.
Need I mention that the local media had a field day? But a concession has been made: during the anniversary year, the heirs will not enforce their rights too strictly. The legal issue itself though has not been addressed. By the way, it turns out that the Eiffel Tower in Paris is not covered by copyright - unless you photograph it at night with its light decorations - which are copyrighted!
As I hereby commit an "act of resistance" against copyright fundamentalism, might I soon be receiving a nasty letter from SABAM or CIPRO (the Belgian and South African copyright organisations), similar to the one received by the architecture website GlassSteelAndStone.com? Oh wait, I should be off the hook for this year at least.
tags: brussels belgium policy-law copyright architecture local-context-global-commons belgium culture
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