[captaincaveman]

How are you going to get a picture of the Mona Lisa? Take a photo? Your not allowed. The people who own the Mona Lisa, prevent people from taking photos of. They instead they take a photo of it themselves, which is a new creative work and has copyrights. Now they have controlled the market on photos of the Mona Lisa and you need to license photos of it from them.

That's what I heard once anyhow.

[knorker]

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da...

Resolution 7,479 × 11,146, or 83 megapixels.

From that page:

The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details.

[FireBeyond]

To be pedantic, though. Just because the WMF (through its counsel, presumably) "takes a position", doesn't infer that "therefore" this piece is public domain.

It may well be, but unless the WMF created the piece, it has no standing to declare this. I may well be reading too much into things, but I know also that the WMF has taken "interesting" legal positions on art (a famous recent photo set up by a wildlife photographer where a curious primate, IIRC, wandered up to the camera and depressed the shutter).

[knorker]

Fair enough. And until courts have ruled, we don't actually know. WMF has vested interest in normalizing it, but on the other hand they do have lawyers so it's not a completely bonkers idea.

And the monkey selfie you mention was actually not obvious legally one way or the other. I believe the human eventually won, but it was down to the details.

In order for something to be copyrightable it needs to have minimal "threshold of originality" to it. In the monkey copyright case the photo clearly had. In the photo I linked to? Much less clearly so.

The EU (because Mona Lisa) is summarized as "The test for the threshold of originality is in the European Union whether the work is the author's own intellectual creation". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality).

One would have a hard time arguing that framing a painting perfectly in the viewfinder is "the author's own intellectual creation".

In the US it's "at least some minimal degree of creativity".

But yes, both could be circumvented by injecting the painting equivalent of "paper towns", I suppose.

But in any case any of these people could start selling copies:

https://jeffhaltrechtphotoblog.com/2015/09/01/selfie-mayhem-...

But of course we could then worry about what a court would say about a "no photos, please" sign and whether it's a binding contract that signs over any copyright over photos in the place (uh, doubtful).

It's an interesting legal area, and I don't reject the idea you mentioned of de facto re-copyright as a whole. I just don't think it applies to Mona Lisa specifically, for these reasons.

But you should also remember that there's a difference between "You're not allowed" and "You are not able" to take a photo.

Unless you have a contract signing away the copyright to the photo, all the establishment can do is ask you to leave after you've already taken the photo.

And I highly doubt a checkbox ToS when you bought the ticket will be considered informed consent of reassignment of copyright.

[FireBeyond]

> And the monkey selfie you mention was actually not obvious legally one way or the other. I believe the human eventually won, but it was down to the details.

Sorry, you're right there - my phrasing was definitely ambiguous. Like you say, there was a lot of nuance. But Wikipedia (initially contributors, then I believe, the Foundation itself) was very aggressive from the outset with "Screw you, no copyright to be found here!" which is an "interesting" stance to take when it's not at all so clearcut.

[knorker]

You're right to point it out. WMF does have a point of view and that case does show that their opinion on copyrightability is not necessarily unbiased.

[captaincaveman]

It's certainly a complex mess :)

[bloak]

What I've heard is that photography of a painting is considered to be a form of reproduction and not the creation of a new work. It might be different if you were to photograph the painting from a funny angle with a shadow falling across it in an artistic way but that's not what we're talking about in the case of a typical Mona Lisa image, like the one the Wikipedia page uses.

[captaincaveman]

here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama