The present post is dedicated to the bruhaha surrounding photos of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, by night. Photos you take of landscapes and cityscapes are great mementos of trips, and who has not put up such photos on the web, in a blog, on one of the many picture sharing sites?
The company operating the Eiffel Tower has this to say about photos:
Q : Is the publishing of a photo of the Eiffel Tower permitted?
A : There are no restrictions on publishing a picture of the Tower by day. Photos taken at night when the lights are aglow are subjected to copyright laws, and fees for the right to publish must be paid to the SETE.
In Germany, trolling websites for photos where the credits are missing or that have been copied without too much thought from what you believed were free stock photos resources, are big business.
Some lawyers specialize in this, and they can send cease and desist letters and make you pay a "reasonable" fee. Which can easily be up to 1000 Euros.
So, be careful, use photos licensed under the Creative Commons Licence, make sure to add credits, and use your own if you really own them.
Since the K-Landsnews blog is not only designed to give information but do so in a light-hearted manner, we end this post by poking fun at the Eiffel Tower by night photo hounds.
Besides the obvious question "what are they thinking?", other questions about copyrighting photos of a building or landscape go through my fading mind: what about people who have photographic memory? Do they have to deny this element of their personhood when they look at the Eiffel Tower's sparkling lights?
Or, in the future, when enhanced reality glasses become widespread: will the copyright mafia bill your credit card every time you look at a copyrighted display, a work of art in a museum, or every time you hear a copyrighted song blaring out of a sidewalk cafe?
Can you spot the Eiffel Tower by night in the photo below?
If you did find the Eiffel Tower by night in this photo, please see an optometrist as soon as possible for a "phantom vision" problem. The photo is from one of the many annual fireworks shows along the Rhine River. They are known as "Rhein in Flammen", generally start in early September, and every weekend another of the towns in the canyon section between Mainz and Koblenz hosts a show.
My preferred one is the show in St. Goar, where you have fireworks from both castles on both sides of the river and from the ridge lines as well as from a barge on the river.
For lack of a better description, I call it the IMAX show of the "Rhein in Flammen" series.
If you really want a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night, just to to Las Vegas.
For those who have read this far, here is what the K-Landnews TheEditor had originally planned for this post: Take a picture of a piece of anatomy, call it My Eiffel Tower, photoshopped to a better size, with a few LEDs wrapped around it, dimly lit (mood lighting, if you will). Then ask the readers if they could spot the Eiffel Tower at night.
Aren't you glad, you got the fireworks picture instead?
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