Please purge all Stonehenge pictures from your galleries!

mountainhouse

Amazing....
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/19/english-heritage-cla.html

Richard

Yeah, right. That's would be like NASA claiming the rights to all moon pics. Sheeesh.

aj986s

Maybe they can use images from here, instead....

chrisjohnson

This is a seemingly crazy discussion which has been going on a while. Recently the London Underground has announced that it is illegal to shoot pictures of their well-known metro logo from the public street for "commercial purposes". English Heritage (owners of Stonehenge and many other monuments) has been under fire for a while for trying to claim license income for photos of their properties for which they are a custodian. There is also a ban on shooting photos "for commercial purposes" from public spaces such as Trafalgar Square and in front of Parliament. To confuse matters more, London Police have been heavy handed with photographers on public streets while citing anti-terrorist legislation.

I don't know that any of these restrictive practices have been challenged in the courts. I can't see many photographers being sufficiently determined to take the costs, while public bodies are likely to have their funding cut when they employ lawyers to enforce their supposed rights. So the rich professionals are meanwhile agreeing to pay license fees to be on the safe side, thereby allowing a de-facto situation to occur and grow in respectability, while the actual legality remains a grey zone and the not-so-rich are being squeezed or intimidated to stop exercising their civil rights to take photos. Equally, images that are now considered normal and license free may become controversial - say you take a world class landscape photo including a tree growing on a farmer's private land. Is that farmer then entitled to claim a share of the income?

The ground rules seem to be that it is ok to shoot monuments from public spaces, but not when you are inside the perimeter fence. Most of us would agree that it is uncool to shoot pictures inside someone's home without permission, whereas it is ok to shoot the outside of their house without permission from the public highway as long as you cannot see them having sex in the front room, and except maybe when they could be construed to be a terrorist target or a movie star. It becomes more debateable when the site in question is a world heritage site (property of us all?) and the so-called owners are in fact merely custodians.

Stonehenge is a particularly complicated case from the legal perspective because English Heritage is being encouraged to acquire huge tracts of countryside around the monument. For those who do not know, Stonehenge is a feature of a massive neolithic civilization that flourished 5000 years ago and which stretches for many miles in all directions. When English Heritage own rights for all images then they will have a business to kill for, and you can imagine that they have government support.

I hope that one of the big boys in our business choose to stand up and be counted in this legal grey zone. It seems to me to be an important issue for our civil liberties and I, for one, would be happy to make a contribution to their legal costs. It is an area of law which needs clarifying. When the trend continues and the principles extend beyond Stonehenge it will become impossible to photograph anything without paying fees.

awoo

aj986s wrote: »

Maybe they can use images from here, instead....

Is this Natural Bridge?

aj986s

awoo wrote: »

Is this Natural Bridge?

Yes....well, not too far from Natural Bridge.

awoo

aj986s wrote: »

Yes....well, not too far from Natural Bridge.

Haha! I think I've driven by there. Been meaning to stop and have a look!

OnlyElise

That's just crazy. I mean, since you do have the right to shoot anything from public property (except as mentioned, of course, in someone's windows or something), I don't even know how they would enforce such a law unless you were trying to sell the image or use it for material gain. Unless you're standing in their "private" property, they don't have any right to tell you not to shoot there. If as Goldenballs said, they are trying to buy up huge tracks of land around it, then photographers are really going to have an issue if they can't get close enough for a good shot from public ground. Some organizations. Sheesh.

ian408

I'd think any legal claim would be hard to prosecute if they've only recently asserted a claim to the copyright.
Especially given images of the monument have already been used for commercial purpose.