Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/05/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Kip Babington wrote: > > Laurent - > > Please pardon a US lawyer's follow up question, I'm not trying to be > argumentative but just to clarify your meaning. As I read your statement > with my own legal background, it means that if I go to France as a tourist I > should just leave my camera at home, because almost any place I am likely to > go would be a "public place" (as that term is used in the law over here.)<<<<<<<<< SNIP Hi Kip, Sorry for cutting in, but I think what the intention of the law means, is to stop "professional photographers" from setting up tripods for personal gain or becoming a pain in the ass with an army of tripods always in the way of the tourists who come to see the high profile Paris locations. I say this simply because, if you consider the millions of tourists who visit Paris and they all have cameras to take family Happy Snaps of themselves in front of the Eiffel Tower or wherever, the ban on picture taking would be so counter productive the tourist industry would hang the mayor and bureaucrats who came up with the law. There wasn't any indication to me by the gendarmes that I couldn't take pictures, they said take all the pictures you want with the camera, but you can't use a tripod. And it seems the tripod is the issue, as the Paris government have taken that, if you use a tripod that automatically makes you a professional and taking pictures for monetary gain. And monetary gain is what they want themselves, as in a piece of the action of the money made by the professional. Or the assumed user of the tripod would make. If they stopped picture taking in such a famous city as Paris, no one would bother going because having your picture taken by the Arc de Triomph or wherever is part of the visit. As in, "Here we are standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. While we were there I'd like to have a dollar for every camera I saw and most certainly a dollar for every exposure made, I could retire three lifetimes quite handsomely. :-) ted