Talk:Freedom of Panorama in Europe in 2015/Contact your MEP

Response from North West England MEPs

I have contacted my local MEPs from all parties. I will update this page with their responses as I recieve them, it may be interesting to compare how they respond. I hope this is an appropriate place to do that.

From Theresa Griffin of the UK Labour Party:

"On behalf of the Labour Party MEPs for the North West of England, thank you for your email.

This amendment relates to an own-initiative (non-legislative) report that is simply an examination by MEPs of the state of play of the implementation of the 2001 Information Society Directive. Therefore the current document has no legal effect. Nonetheless, I fully understand your concerns and the Labour Party will vote against any amendment which negatively affects the current UK provisions on Freedom of Panorama.

The European Commission will propose a wide-ranging copyright reform by the end of this year, and the European Parliament has been at the forefront of keeping the debate going on the Freedom of Panorama and other issues.

Labour MEPs are committed to ensuring that the Commission, when proposing its copyright reform, takes on board the views of creators, industry and consumers so that we can create a copyright system which works fairly for everyone. This includes enhanced rights for creators of cultural content, and the increased possibility for portability of services and access to cross-border content.

I hope this answers your concerns.

Best Wishes, Theresa Griffin MEP"

This is so dumb

No seriously they won't listen if you call them and visiting them in Brussels won't do anything other than possibly getting you in jail. Many of them don't even go anywhere near Brussels anyway. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 89.101.250.93 (talk) 23:30, 1 July 2015‎

Probably they want more money from tourism. Or just to stifle entreprenourship. You never know. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Doru001 (talk) 09:56, 3 July 2015‎

Well, maybe they won't listen if just a few persons ask them, but if a whole lot of people contact them, I guess it should have an impact. 80.221.45.145 15:45, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Sorry

I can't be polite at this time. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Doru001 (talk) 07:49, 2 July 2015‎

This information in other languages??

I feel this would be helpful in other languages... If anyone knows how to do it (or where to find an explanation on how to translate it) please do/tell. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 85.178.237.42 (talk) 11:00, 2 July 2015‎

Edit: should have realised earlier that the map contains links —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 85.178.237.42 (talk) 11:00, 2 July 2015‎

Also draw support from the fact that freedom of panorama benefits their constituencies

I do not want to edit the page directly, as it may be a result of careful discussions on what to emphasize and not, but do not forget that commercial use of pictures of skylines and distinctive buildings is essential for promoting tourism.

Just look around to see what kind of imagery airlines, hotels, tour organizers and others in the tourism and conferencing sector tend to use. Photos and drawings of famous structures are everywhere. The official tourism boards of cities and regions—as well as large corporations—might be able to take the time and effort to contact every copyright holder to get permission, but for small and medium-sized businesses, it will be easier to just drop the use of photos of anything but really old buildings. This will be bad for the overall marketing of the cities and regions that the MEPs represent.--OttoG (talk) 12:04, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Google Earth / Maps / Street View

Would this mean Google have to obtain permission from everyone?

Impossible to implement, stupid to put forward in the first place. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.143.224.209 (talk) 15:00, 2 July 2015

Google would probably have to obtain permission from every architect and sculptor whose work is shown on Google Street View, yes. --Stefan2 (talk) 20:58, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Actually they would need permission from the rightsholders of every building and artistic work. That's even worse. --NaBUru38 (talk) 22:59, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Contacting MEP's

The supposed link provided to contact your MEP just provides a link to all MEPs. I have no idea who my MEP is. Could you please list them all by constituency — clearly explaining precisely which MEP to contact depending where you are? That would at least enable me to contact my MEP, and I'm guessing many others also. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 88.104.11.190 (talk) 01:21, 4 July 2015

If you click on the link, it should show you a map of Europe. Click on your country and it will list the MEP's from there. If your country is large enough to have constituencies, there should be a drop-down list of constituencies above the list. Find your constituency and you should have a list of your MEP's. You can write to any or all of them. Green Giant (talk) 02:27, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

In most countries, the MEPs are elected via a proportional election system with country-wide lists, so they do not have territorial constituencies, the "constituency" being the country as a whole. --L.Willms (talk) 06:49, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Legal aspects of 'Panorama Law' that cast doubt over EU action.

It is quite possible to argue that by placing, constructing, exposing, unveiling, bringing into view any object, structure, art work, design, invention, design, in a place or venue to which non-paying members of the public have free access, the object in question has been 'made public', thereby acknowledging the right of the public to view, assess, criticize, photograph, film, comment upon, enjoy, memorize, draw, discuss and offer opinions regarding the object in question.

Thus any attempt to extract payment, restrict access to or deny reproduction, photograph, film, record or comment upon the object is, per se, an illegal restriction of their human rights of free-movement, right to comment, enjoy public space. The object is de jure something embodying the right to be enjoyed by any person as it has been 'published' by the owner of the object, building, art work, etc. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 109.223.5.112 (talk) 17:44, 5 July 2015‎

I fully agree. Any principle taken to the limit destroys itself. Maybe I planted some tree which is a piece of art, maybe I colored the sky gray with my artistic factory, and now you enjoy the view, just like you enjoy a movie you didn't pay for. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 5.12.24.168 (talk) 18:08, 5 July 2015‎

And in the case of architects, they usually don't earn money through copyright, but by finding more companies who want them for their projects. Publicity helps their business. --NaBUru38 (talk) 23:02, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

I'm not from Europe, but:

I am not a European Union citizen, but I don't think removing the imagery of modern architecture is a step towards a more modern and open Europe, and to defend this idea I have the following reasons:

Taking a picture of a building or an architecture is simply a moment of time, digitally frozen on a medium of some sort, like HDDs for example. If we take this right of taking pictures away from people and Europeans, it is logically equal to either forcing the people to acquire a licence for even looking at the architectures by their own eyes, meaning that no one is to even look at the buildings, unless they have a licence to do so. Another way would be to completely demolish all the buildings and kill all the ideas for modern architectures before they are even born, cause people might see them, or take pictures of them. Which brings us to the conclusion that preventing people from taking pictures of such modern monuments is actually backwardness and a step away from a modern and open world of tomorrow, both for Europe and for the world.

The most obvious reason that the governments would want to prevent HD panoramic pictures of such buildings, is the possibility of copying the architectural ideas in some other parts of the world, which is absolutely logical. But again it should be mentioned that we are almost at this moment of time and history that thanks to the explosion of information, originality could never be forgotten. In other words if any person or entity would undertake the procedure of copying a modern architecture somewhere else on the planet, it would be simply a waste of human and natural resources, for, one, it would not be hard to recognize that a work of architecture is not original and just a rip-off of another work, cause probably thanks to Wikipedia and other sources, any human would be able to recognize that they are just copying another building. Two, making a replica of a modern building that is already in existence somewhere else in the world, is a waste of resources, cause nothing is the original, not to mention that trying to make a replica of a building would actually require some trial and error procedure of some kind, that again would probably be a wasteful undertaking.

There is only one and only London eye. we can't have a London eye everywhere, like we can't produce scotch everywhere. ;)

As I mentioned earlier I am not a European, but I hope the best for Europe and also the rest of the world.

Contacting MEP is too hard make an App like https://represent.us/ did

Contacting MEP is too hard, there are lots of MEPs for each country, the link to contact them is hard to find even after your find the MEPs pages, and emailing all 21 of them (21 for Portugal) is morose and boring.

https://represent.us/ for several actions made an app that 1st showed you who your representatives were given your location, 2nd) allowed a piece of text to be emailed to them all with one click WurmD (talk) 14:07, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Standardised email

This campaign is crying out for a standardised email to make it as easier for people to contact their MEP, and more likely to do so.