I don't know how it is in other countries but in general in France you cannot just take a picture of a building and put it on Instagram without asking the architect for rights :

> the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitutes, according to the provisions of the article L122-4 of the Code of the intellectual property an act of counterfeit.

France must get a lot of money from all the photos of the Eiffel Tower on the internet. Has anyone been sued/convicted of breaking that and paid reparations?

Fun fact, the Eiffel Tower architecture is not protected since 1990, but the lighting is. So it's illegal to use commercialy a night time photo of the tower[1][2].

I don't think anybody has ever been sued but the SETE (Société d'exploitation de la tour Eiffel) do make money with the image.

[1] https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Illumination_copy...

Interesting I hadn’t heard of that!

Is this law often enforced?

I wonder how they deal with real estate pictures. Do most people get a license to reproduce the images of their house when they buy it?

I read some year ago that this kind of thing applies to New York as well, that was in the context of an open-world Spider-Man game featuring NY skylines.