Colours & Notes

Any use of resources offered here is only allowed as long as this does not infringe the rights of third parties in an illegitimate way.

Specifically, I explicitly forbid the retrieval of photos of buildings or other works, which might themselves be protected by copyright law, by users or programs from countries, or any other transfer of such photos into such countries, where taking photos of such buildings or works, and the spreading of the resulting depictions, is NOT allowed by respective exceptions in copyright law, or by the decision that the legislation of the home country of the photographer is applicable.

As the state of legislation and its implementation are complex, and the subject of much controversial discussion even among experts, and technical measures like geo-blocking are difficult to set up to conform with legislation just because legislation is complex - but afterwards, can be almost immediately and trivially circumvented even by the most simple VPN services - but nevertheless, providing photos or other works in the WWW, nowadays, appears to be the sole feasible and practically relevant way to present any own artistic or creative work - and moreover, any factual distribution or reception of any data provided for use on the Internet will occur ONLY AFTER any use of a client program which is designed to achieve this - and the user has a much better chance than myself, to know the applicable legislation in their own country - the explicit limitation of any permitted use to what conforms to applicable legislation and does not cause any damage to third parties in the situation of any possible user (which I cannot universally anticipate) appears to be the only rational way I can see, to protect the rights of third parties and at the same time, still be able to provide an adequate selection of content while keeping the interests of all possibly involved parties in a reasonable balance.

Now, these painted cows are quite obviously works of art, and protected by copyright laws. In Switzerland, it would STILL be perfectly legal to take photos, and publish these photos, of such works which are permanently displayed on grounds accessible to anyone. Some countries, however, do NOT have equivalent legislation. And some sources say that copyright law applies according to where the photos would be published, rather than where they were taken. Consequently, photos of buildings or works of art could never be freely displayed on an internationally accessible WWW site, merely based on the mentioned exception. Which would completely invalidate the national exceptions for works of art that are already openly displayed, and turn them into a very huge trap instead.

Consequently, my photos of the painted cows can ONLY be accessed by family members and close friends, protected by a password. Thus, they're used in private only, and NOT published world-wide at all. Thus, with all our current technology - we merely reach the exact opposite of the WWW: The world-wide-NON-availability of information, which artists and legistlation both wanted to make freely accessible. How exquisitely inspiring!

This is obviously bad for the artists, whose project expressly wanted to address the public; and equally bad for the motorway service area, who obviously wanted to use the cows to attract more visitors.

But: That's just what you get when some copyright (or rather: money-)collecting societies or lawyers prefer to rather milk the cow until it drops dead, instead of letting the arts (and even laws) reach their original, non-monetary goals :-(