Can I be sued for posting a night picture of the Eiffel Tower under CC-BY-SA?
<p>I am an American tourist visiting France, and take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, the tower being the main and central subject of the picture.</p>

<p>Going back to the US, I upload this picture to my website under a CC-BY-SA license.</p>

<p>Can I be sued for infringing the copyright of the Eiffel Tower's lighting design?</p>

<p><strong>Yes</strong>. Your work is a derivative from the Eiffel lightning so you <em>could</em> be sued (the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel may not be too interested in prosecuting you at a foreign country, and thus you might get away with it, but they certainly can).</p>

<p>You can license your copyright in the photo, but their copyright still remain, so the full photo cannot be used as CC-BY-SA unless they also licensed their piece or until it expires.</p>

<p>Depending of the contents of the photo you could claim that it is <em>Fair Use</em> (applicable to using the photo on your website, not to your claim that the photo is CC-BY-SA) or <em>de minimis</em> (if the eiffel tower was not the main focus, you should take into account the how it is interpretated in US and France).</p>

<p>You seem to think that by publishing from US you don't need to care about French copyright but that's not the case, since both are signers of the Berne Convention.</p>

<p>However, a possible outcome of being sued in the US <em>and winning</em> might be that court ruled that the Eiffel lightining is not really copyrightable.</p>

<p>If it is subject to US law (and my understanding of the Berne convention Article 5(4)a is that it is) then <strong>no</strong>.</p>

<p>As detailed here <a href="http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-architectural-photos.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-architectural-photos.html</a>; architectural copyright came into force on 1 December 1990 and any buildings constructed before then (e.g. the Eifel Tower) are not protected. </p>

<p>I do not know when the current lighting installation was made but I think you would be safe even if this happened latter because:</p>

<ol>
<li>It is debatable if the illumination of a piece of architecture is itself covered by copyright. The plans that document the design of the lighting clearly are as is the tower itself but I don't think that the term "architecture" can be extended to cover just the illumination; but I may be wrong about that.</li>
<li>Except for buildings that can’t be viewed from a public space, the copyright owner of a post-1990 building (the architect, developer or building owner) can’t prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the building. (17 U.S.C. 120).</li>
</ol>

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