Besides, there are plenty of ways as an American I can force you to remove a photo without it being “blatant free speech” issue. Copyright and trademark come to mind, NDAs too.
Person A wants to put a photograph of Person B on facebook. Person B does not want their image on facebook.
Person A has a right to freedom of expression. Person B has a right to privacy. These two rights are in conflict in this case.
It's not that we're not respecting freedom of expression - it's simply not that absolute. It's that we're drawing the line between one person's rights and another's, and Europe often draws that line in different places than the US does.
But be clear - both A and B have rights here. The only way to be absolute about one person's rights is to disregard the other's.
I think this is the best, most succinct summation of the global free speech and privacy issue.
You're free to not really respect the privacy of others, provided you are in a jurisdiction that allows you to do so. This hypothetical jurisdiction however, would not be Europe.
For example if you are in the US and operate a website in the US and get a visitor from the EU then the GDPR may apply to you with respect to that visitor.
The question is then one of enforceability but that's the reason why some American websites have GDPR notices or restrict access to visitors from the EU.
Likeness rights are likeness rights. Nothing to do with free speech. For IP law reasons, people don't have a right to distribute pictures with your likeness in them, unless you explicitly grant them that right. (If things didn't work this way, the modelling industry would collapse.)
Commercial documentaries have images of people who didn't give consent all the time.
>For IP law reasons, people don't have a right to distribute pictures with your likeness in them, unless you explicitly grant them that right.
Of course they do. Every newspaper does it every day.
>(If things didn't work this way, the modelling industry would collapse.)
People can nonetheless charge for sitting for a photo shoot. And the use of images in marketing/advertising contexts (e.g. in an ad, in a company brochure) does indeed require explicit permission. You also get into publicity rights etc. of famous people.
But if I take a street photo of you and illustrate my blog with it or publish it in a book of my photos? I absolutely don't need permission for a photo otherwise obtained lawfully.
It's more about royalties. The professional modelling industry (of any kind—hand models, for an unusual example) would be unsustainable if the only payment were direct work-for-hire. Models need to make money from downstream uses of their likeness, just like people who produce music need to make money from downstream sampling of their song. Otherwise, the most profitable position would become that of the "sampler" (who, after all, wouldn't need to license anything, and so would get their source material for free!), strangling out those who rely on original licensed material, and thus killing any demand for those who produce such material.
> Every newspaper does it every day.
The thing that journalists and documentarists are doing, in such cases (though not all—they often do license!) is fair use. And fair use is a defense, not a legal justification (i.e. it's like murder in self-defense, not like executing someone as part of your legal duties as a state executioner.) In other words, doing something under fair use does not protect you from getting sued; it just means you potentially have a good argument to use, if-and-when you do get sued.
Yes, oftentimes certain types of likeness rights are "obvious fair use." For example, a picture taken of a place, where that place contains a crowd—the photographer is unlikely to attempt to acquire likeness rights for anybody in the crowd. But technically, any one of those people could still sue for an infringement of their likeness rights.
Now, normally, such a crowd-member who sued wouldn't win... but if the person in the crowd was an "ex-celebrity" who'd gone into hiding and had made a statement that they didn't want to be in the public eye any more; and the paparazzist took the photo specifically because the ex-celebrity was in the crowd, with the intent of printing it out on the side of a building and highlighting with a spotlight just the little bit of it where the person is? They'd have a very good case. Even though it's still "a picture of a crowd, in public."
As well, you lose any notion of this implicit "obvious" fair-use defense, when you're no longer taking pictures of public places. A nudist beach, for example? Usually they've legally arranged to be considered "public-access private commercial facilities." You have no fair-use defense for pictures taken there, any more than you do for pictures taken inside a Starbucks.
A home is a private place. Grandma isn't taking street photos. In fact, without an explicit grant of rights, she's not just infringing upon the subject's likeness rights; she's surveilling private property. Just like most retail stores say you are, if you go in and take pictures of the shelves.
Why oh why does absolutely everything have to boil down to "free speech"?
Do you want to only have one human right? Free speech but no other rights?
People have the right to a private life as well as the right to freedom of expression and a list of other rights (the right to life, the right to a fair trial etc. etc.) and often these rights conflict.
In this case it's the right to a private life and the right to freedom of expression.
Neither right trumps the other, having both is important for society to function well.
And when the right balance between them is struck, actually having the right to a private life can protect the freedom of expression.
As an example: If one thinks anything and everything they say is _likely_ to be published publicly or to an authority that might then be prejudiced against them then they're likely to self-censor.
That's bad for free speech.
But if one has the right to a private life and is thus in control of what they say then they're less likely to self-censor.
In Europe we generally don't. In Germany we certainly don't.
We have a doctrine of "practical concordance" where all basic rights limit each other and have to be weighed such that all basic rights achieve maximal effect. In a way we're looking for a global maximum, not a local "free speech trumps personal rights" solution.
And on another note: I always find it rich when Americans complain about that. America specifically forged our constitution that way. Free speech was not very important post-war, when de-nazification called for banning books, closing all newspapers, licensing newspapers by publishers who were politically "right".
You got that right back then, I'm not complaining about that. But if you had wanted full American Free Speech in Germany, you could have implemented it with a stroke of a pen. Don't blame us now.
They are not alleging that the photos were taken against the parents' (or children's) will. It seems to imply that a person carries a perpetual license on their likeness.
Maybe that children are involved makes this case special (unclear here). Or maybe someone who liked a photo of themselves one day gets to demand it be taken down later. Imagine a couple dating put up a photo. They break up and a couple years later one is getting married and demands the other takes down that photo.
People are allowed to have opinions in opposition to that of the sitting government, including ones that sat well before we were even born.
Yes, but they need to justify them. Disregarding tradition goes both ways. You can't brush off the German conception of the law and then just go "well that's censorship bro", which is honestly 90% of the discourse on HN on these issues.
The notion of a 'concordance of legal values' is highly intuitive. There's a very strong case to be made that laws are not sacred, that they serve the public good, and thus ought to be balanced. It's the free speech absolutism that is purely an artefact of American culture, practised virtually nowhere else to this degree.
Absolute free speech is a flawed concept anyways and even America acknowledges that with the legal concept of hate speech.
There are other instances like swearing on TV.
The radio spectrum is regulated by the FCC. If you want to broadcast on it, you have to get a license and abide by the rules. The FCC has many rules about the content of radio communications including the frequency, the modulation, the maximum transmit power, and yes the content. For example: amateur radio & citizen's band communications can't be encrypted. But even when it comes to broadcast TV, some swearing is allowed. And you can swear as much as you want on cable or streaming services.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti...
> Person A ordered to remove pictures of person B from facebook.
That's legal? That's not a blatant free speech issue?
(This isn't to say Grandma isn't being an asshole by posting them, but generally you have a right to be an asshole)
Edit: I just want to say I'm pretty happy with the discussion this post generated :) Also, it's been bouncing around from -4 to 0 points repeatedly.