The Eiffel Tower’s likeness has long been part of the public domain. However, in 2003 it was abruptly repossessed by the city of Paris. That’s the year that the SNTE, the company charged with maintaining the tower, adorned it with a lighting display, in which it asserts copyright, and reclaimed the nighttime image and likeness of the most popular monument on earth:
‘As a result, it’s no longer legal to publish current photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission. Technically, this applies even to amateurs. When I spoke to the Director of Documentation for SNTE, Stéphane Dieu, via phone last week, he assured me that SNTE wasn’t interested in prohibiting the publication of amateur photography on personal Web sites. “It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn’t used in ways we don’t approve,” said Mr Dieu.’
It’s probably not as unreasonable as it sounds for copyright to be used defensively to protect a building design — or even an entire cityscape — from unauthorised reproduction. However, the restrictive terms under which SNTE allows photographs of the Tower to be published seem more likely to hinder creativity by creating pointless approval procedures than to promote it.
Further, if the protection was ever exploited more aggressively (for example, by requiring all nocturnal images of the Tower to be purchased or licensed from the gift shop), photographers everywhere would be deprived of what is a most spectacular subject. Images like this and this would no longer be possible. Parisians are reliant on the SNTE to use their legal rights reasonably.
