Poetlister wrote:Why not abolish copyright entirely? That would make life even easier for Wikipedia editors.
To be fair, you've got to have Freedom of Panorama in case ISIS comes around to your ancient town built in the 8th Century BCE and pretty much totally destroys it, or maybe you've got a couple of giant Buddha statues carved into the living rock of a cliffside and al Qaeda comes around and destroys that. Or if you'd prefer not to focus on the Islamic world, it's always possible that your art museum containing precious works by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso could be hit by a bomb or cruise missile one day, perhaps even by accident - or, your 800-year-old world-class cathedral could burn down because somebody on a contract maintenance crew forgot to stub out his cigarette.
Still, I certainly understand the argument that easily-accessed photos of artworks end up costing museums and galleries (along with the cities in which they're located) in terms of reduced tourist income, and (IMO) there
should be limits/constraints on the commercial sale/resale of unlicensed high-quality reproductions, but AFAIK this bill doesn't explicitly prevent that... Mostly though, I'm just happy that it doesn't make a specific fair-use exception for "online encyclopedia" operations, like the recent EU Copyright Act did. The WMF will claim that it qualifies under the "educational" exemption, but at least the South Africans have smartly left themselves a means of challenging that, if and when Wikipedia becomes enough of a problem for them.
