Don’t tempt me, Monsieur
Did you know that it’s illegal (under French law) to publish a picture of the Eiffel Tower taken at night? The only way around it is to pay some sort of bribe to some government agency, as did the tour agency that published the photo shown here.
The policy is mentioned on the Eiffel Tower web site here, and there are a couple of long discussions of the issue here and here.
Damn, I thought I was done taking pictures in Paris, because I won’t have much time left. Now I have to fit in a night-time trip to the Eiffel Tower, to get a photo and post it for everyone to see. Viva La France!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 4:25 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on October 4, 2006 at 2:48 pm Tom wrote:
The Bean in Chicago has a similar problem. It’s a big sculpture in Grant Park that reflects everything inside and outside of it. The artist has apparently stated that it’s a copyrighted piece and that any picture of it should be accompanied by a royalty payment to him. The City of Chicago has decided to back him, and warns tourists not to take pictures of it (with cops on Segways, no less).
This, as you might imagine, started a record number of people posting pictures of it on the Web. And I can’t blame them. The most interesting argument, I think, is that it only reflects OTHER potentially copyrighted material (all the buildings along Michigan Avenue, or pictures of individuals inside the Bean). Therefore, one must take the laws of optics into consideration, making it very hard to enforce any silly law about taking pictures of a thing intended for the public placed in a public place.
And to say that the tallest, strangest thing in Paris is subject to photographic restrictions is just silly. Gotta love the French, though — they’re almost as crazy as the Chicagoans!