Copyright exists to protect artists, writers, designers, so that their work is recognized as theirs, and they get recognition – and financial rewards – for it. In itself, it is very typical of our culture, where the individual has been at the center of things ever since, probably, the renaissance.

But I digress. The thing that surprised me is the fact that publishing a photograph of a building (say, the Atomium) means the architect has the right to receive royalties.

In a way, it’s understandable: unlike other copyrighted works, like a book, or a song, it’s fairly unlikely that the item itself (a building) will be reproduced. So the only way to apply copyright is to charge for a photo.

Which makes a photo of a building a doubly copyrighted thing, since the creativity of the photographer and the architect both are involved. An architect friend says that, while people don’t know this, it actually applies to 70% of the buildings around us.

I’ve got an even better story: a young american couchsurfer of Melissa‘s, who was on his Eurotour, told us that he wasn’t allowed to take photographs of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel.

So he thought: fair enough, this is a measure to protect the paint from any flashes going off accidentally. But not at all ! Apparently, any published photographs of the paintings would infringe copyright, not to Leonardo (copyright expired), but the renovators of the paintings !

I used to have a course at university about intellectual rights like patents and copyright. But it seems we only skimmed the surface of a strange and complex world.