No Joke: Copyright Fees Required for Taking Photos in Chicago Parks
Posted by David Bollier on Fri, 02/04/2005 - 10:08am
I could hardly believe that Starbucks might actually stop people from taking photos in its coffee salons. But once Larry Lessig blogged about the topic in May 2004, coffee mavens from New York to Hong Kong and points in between chimed in with their own stories. The stories were remarkably similar: while taking snapshots of friends in a Starbucks, a manager or barista would tell them they were not allowed to take photos in the store. Starbucks never clarified its policy or non-policy on the issue (their PR rep never got back to me last year), but the speculation is that Starbucks was trying to prevent anyone from photographing their signature “trade dress” interiors. One of the more hilarious responses was a website, Starbucksphotos.com, now dormant, which invited people to post snapshots of themselves in Starbucks (Flickr has a large array of photos tagged with Starbucks, however).
Now comes word from the Chicago Reader (January 28; subscribers only) that the managers of Chicago's Millennium Park require a permit and payment of a fee in order to take photos in a Chicago park. In a story by Ben Joravsky, “The Bean Police,” we learn that Warren Wimmer was trying to take a picture of Cloud Gate, a massive sclupture knoown known locally as “The Bean,” when two security guards on Segways cruised up to him and asked if he had a permit – “a permit that lets you take pictures of the park.” ...
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