erosion of cultural accumulation--even in Paris

Feb. 11, 2005

Well, this is not exactly a part of the travelogue--it deals with what happened after our trip. But since it concerns me as a photo-lover and a culture-lover in general, and it is about The Icon of France, I decided to post this here.

The issue is the copyright. Yes, that hedious trend of copyrighting virtually everything--from an iconic building to an entire park. So many have joined this narrow-minded bandwagon, but I was surprised to see Paris joining it. According to this post on boingboing, now that the image of the Tour Eiffel at night is copyrighted by the company that maintains the Tour, anyone who intends to photograph that image at night has to purchase a permit to do so. Otherwise, it'll violate the copyright. As you see in the boingboing article, they got around the limit of copyright by putting up flash lights all around the Tour so that the new, copyrightable image is different from the old, familiar image of the Tour Eiffel, which is not copyrightable any more. For me, being lax (or generous) about representation and interpretation of a particular cultural object provides a good way to measure the cultural maturity of the owner of the object, whether it is a city or an artist him/herself. The reason for this, I have argued on my main blog, so I will refrain from repeating it. But it is stunning and sad, to say the least, to see one of the biggest and most respected cultural city of the world expose its shallow understanding about how culture and ultimately our civilization functions based on the open pool of accumulated cultural heritage.

Will there be a day when this photo of my happy plush monkey has to be taken down because of the background image of the Tour? I really hope not. But I'm not positive. We (or they) need to come to senses...

monkey at the tour eiffel
Originally uploaded by uBookworm.