[moritzwarhier]

Nah that's barely scratching the tip of the iceberg.

Likelihood for a shot of a house and one person in front of it, facing the camera, is non-zero.

Could be a passersby or even the person living there leaving their house.

Both don't qualify for "panoramafreiheit", afaik.

Google was just a good exemplary case.

What I'm not sure about is the freedom to photograph buildings per se.

AFAIK, "panoramafreiheit" applies here. But Google just chose to bow to every removal request, since manually checking them would have been to expensive.

[pgeorgi]

Panoramafreiheit also covers picture containing people as long as they aren't the focus or reason of the image, but things get more complicated there (and individual cases could override things). The blurring of people, name plates, license plates and the like (which already existed, that wasn't driven by German concerns) helps a lot in that regard.

Blurring entire buildings was the compromise made specifically for Germany[1], but that was used so much that further bring-up of Street View probably wasn't worth their while. And that was to some degree due to the media frenzy back in the day. I mean, some people actually thought it would be live video of every location! (yes, Germany has its share of tech-illiterate hillbillies, and wow, are they vocal...)

So now Google tries again and crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's and this article has the following to say about this: "In a somewhat transparent attempt to avoid the same issues as in 2010 and 2011, Google is working alongside a German privacy commission this time", as if working with the DPAs is something sinister. "somewhat transparent attempt", really?

You just can't please some people...

[1] Side note: France doesn't have an equivalent to the freedom of panorama, and stuff like the illumination pattern of the Eiffel tower falls under copyright, with cases prosecuted for that. Yet it was pretty much fully visible on Street View from early on.

[iggldiggl]

> Panoramafreiheit also covers picture containing people as long as they aren't the focus or reason of the image, but things get more complicated there (and individual cases could override things).

Panoramafreiheit proper is really just about copyright, people have nothing to do with it. There's a separate law regarding pictures of people, with the aforementioned exception for people that have just incidentally been captured (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/kunsturhg/BJNR000070907.h...).

[iggldiggl]

> What I'm not sure about is the freedom to photograph buildings per se. > AFAIK, "panoramafreiheit" applies here.

Panoramafreiheit just covers the copyright part, in case any part of the building design is considered a copyrighted work of art. Everything else just falls under the fact that German law knows no "right to pictures of your own property" (unlike the "right to pictures of your own image", which is a part of German law).

[interloxia]

Another interesting example is public art exhibitions. Posting photos to social media without a license has been problematic. Search for Hamburg Blue Port as an example.