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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Those two public gathering photos seem utterly indistinguishable to me. Yes, one is a bit more zoomed in but they both have clearly identifiable people in them.

More broadly, I'm pretty sure many thousands, if not millions, of photos are shared every day on social media and in other forms that have clearly identifiable people in them. The vast vast majority of which the subject is blissfully unaware.

I haven't actually spent a lot of time in Germany specifically--relatively speaking. But I'm sure I have a very great many photos online that violate one or more of these rules.

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>Those two public gathering photos seem utterly indistinguishable to me.

The difference is that the first two public gatherings show a historical landmark (the Brandenburg Gate) and a political protest. The last photo is just a few people gathering.

In practice the difference is usually pretty clear. If there's something of public interest in the photo it's fine, but you can't just take a snapshot of a bunch of people having a picnic in a park or just sitting on the subway without consent.

The last photo looks to be some sort of public gathering or protest as well although the nature of it isn't immediately clear from just the photo.

In any case, any of those photos would be absolutely allowable in the US. Wouldn't even be a grey area.

> utterly indistinguishable to me

Utterly?

While somewhat harder, it looks like one is a protest and one is a photo of people dancing at an music event. Please don't take photos of people just enjoying themself (in Germany). Most people change their behavior when a camera is pointed at them.

Lukely some clubs have strict "no photo" rules and put little stickers on your phone camera. Can't do that in a street festival though.

> Please don't take photos of people just enjoying themself (in Germany).

This is absurd. Sorry, I enjoy taking photos of joy.

Yeah, me too. But please do it with consent.

> You don’t need their permission if… the people in the picture are participating in a public gathering, parade or similar event, and they are not the focus of the photo

The third picture focuses on an individual.

That seems to be a subjective artistic interpretation. You could crop the un-focused one in a way that would be presumably focused. Is the cropping illegal? Is the photo retroactively illegal? I'm surprised that these laws exist because they seem so ambiguous to me. Sometimes I don't even know the focus of my own photos.

if you take photos for your own use and don't share them online then you will be fine. if you want to share them, making sure that people can't be recognized, like blurring the faces, should probably be enough. but IANAL

>don't share them online

ROFL. I suspect a lot of these laws/rules predate ubiquitous smartphone cameras and perhaps even widespread digital photography. Not that I do much in the way of "street photography" as such I'm pretty sure I have hundreds of photos online, including from Germany, that violate one or more of these rules.

right, and for the most part that's fine too. i am not going to bother about my face showing up in your family album, whether you asked me or not. if you had asked, i'd probably have said yes anyways. however, the point of the law is that anyone downloading your album and exploiting it in some form is violating my rights just as much as you did if you didn't ask, and even more so if they make money off it, or defame my person, and so the law gives me the right to not only ask you to take the photo down, but sue those exploiters for damages. i am not going to sue you, because you didn't profit from the image. yours was an innocent mistake, and simply taking down the image will be enough for you. but if you had the legal right to take and publish my face without my permission, then i would not have the law on my side to stop anyone who is actively exploiting that.

The cropped or re-focused image isn't the same as the original, at best a derivative.

And yes, in general a photo of a larger gathering is fine, singling out any person is not. So the original would be fine, the derivative not.

True, but I think a fairly uncontroversial one.

The subject of the first photo is the Brandenburg Gate. The subject of the second photo is a climate change protest. The subject of the third is a man dancing.

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