What is commercial exploitation of a picture of a public building? Magazine, postcard, website? The licensing procedure would be so cumbersome that the thought is just ridiculous. From the moment a building is visible in a public space, like a street, park or landscape, its image cannot be protected and users charged for showing it. If you need to close a road or access inside the building, that may be a different case and it’s already covered by individual countries and local administrations. Many years ago I became involved in the production of a documentary for the BBC in Rome, as a local producer. It was a nightmare, as we had to negotiate every single shot with museums and various administrations controlling the locations, with arbitrary payments and conditions demanded for each site. It was a non-commercial, cultural use, in a number of public buildings – a few seconds of footage at a time. The time wasted asking for permits and the payments made the whole project prohibitively expensive. If we want to stimulate creativity and enterprise, let’s reduce the idiotic licensing chores, not introduce new, senseless ones.
Introducing this kind of vague, unenforceable rule would only create a vast space of arbitrary and uneven applications, in which each photographer, amateur or professional, could be harassed by clueless or corrupt local authorities, creating a batch of new hellish regulations. The whole thing stinks and it looks like a Eurosceptic’s wet dream, showing how useless and stupid the EU can be.
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