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German Photog Wants to Shoot Buildings Excluded From Street View
crf00 writes with this report excerpted from Blogoscoped: "'Spiegel reports that German photographer and IT consultant Jens Best wants to personally take snapshots of all those (German) buildings which people asked Google Street View to remove. He then wants to add those photos to Picasa, including GPS coordinates, and in turn re-connect them with Google Maps. Jens believes that for the internet 'we must apply the same rules as we do in the real world. Our right to take panoramic snapshots, for instance, or to take photographs in public spaces, both base laws which determine that one may photograph those things that are visible from public streets and places.' Jens says that for his belief in the right of photographing in public places, as last resort he's even willing to go to jail. Spiegel says Jens already found over 200 people who want to help out in this project and look for removed locations in Google Street View, as there's no official list of such places published by Google."
The manually taken photos were of higher quality, and more detail than the Google streetview ones. Then the request to remove from streetview........ could result in more detailed imagery of the area being posted to a place where more people will notice it
(Since streetview is so large, and has so many images.... a picture of an obscure place would probably not be noticed by many people, let alone get any attention or concern)
Ever had a stalker? Sometimes people do care. It can be kind of frightening. Especially for a young woman.
There's another side to this apart from the legal side. There's the community side, which is to say the common (? or not so much, any more, sadly) courtesy that makes the difference between a narcissist or an outright sociopath and someone who understands that sometimes, just because you can, doesn't trump "this person really doesn't want me to, is upset about it, and you know what, maybe I can have a bit of a heart and say okay".
This gentleman may have the law on his side, but I would be quite impressed if he took the stance of "I'm going to be a human being and take another person's feelings into account". Call me old-fashioned or idealistic, but I think that may just make the world a better place, in some small way.
In Germany, there's the so-called freedom of the panorama, which means, that you're allowed to take pictures of the panorama in public places, which includes houses etc. However, that freedom is limited to a natural perspective, so you may take take the picture while walking down the street, but you may not use a stepladder or step on a car roof to get a higher vantage point. It's a very simple to understand and convenient rule about private space. If you don't want to be photographed in your garden, make the wall high enough that people passing-by can't see over it. If someone peeks over that wall and takes pictures, he's invading your privacy.
So what the photographer proposes to do is probably perfectly legal. With the Google streetview cars the problem is, they take the pictures from higher up than regular eye level, thus the freedom of the panorama doesn't apply to them and they get in all kind of trouble. There's another company (can't remember which one) taking pictures of streets, but they have mounted the cameras directly on the car roof, probably to avoid the problems Google has.
All in all, Google is in this mess in Germany because they didn't bother to check local laws and believed American rules apply everywhere.