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Use of AbsurdePhoton website and its content
The content of all the pages of the site AbsurdePhoton.fr is protected by French law, according to a concept called Author’s Rights ( « Droit d’Auteur » in French). A clarification of the term Author’s Rights is given below, with the equivalence of the term Copyright.
The elements of the site are accessible to the public only for consultation / internet browsing.
The copy of all or part of the elements of the site in written or electronic form is only possible with the express authorization of 
. It is forbidden to reproduce , transmit, modify, combine or use the website for any commercial or dissemination purpose, except with prior written authorization.
AbsurdePhoton.fr being a site dealing with photography, particular attention was given to photographic reproductions in electronic format of photographer / author , and sporadically other photographers / authors, to ensure the good information of the public of the various applicable rights.
If an error relating to author’s rights and/or copyright has been made on the AbsurdePhoton.fr site, please immediately contact me.
Author’s Rights and Copyright
Author’s Rights
As said above, the artistic and intellectual works of are protected by French law according to the notion of Author’s Rights. This results in two types of rights: property rights and moral rights.
Author’s Rights refers to the rights that creators possess over their artistic and literary works. They are acquired automatically from the moment the work is produced, regardless of the form of expression used. The act of taking a photograph (pressing the shutter button) corresponds to this definition.
Moral Rights
The author has in France imprescriptible moral rights on his work, which are transmitted to his heirs without limitation of duration.
The author also has inalienable moral rights, which means that they cannot be transferred. For example, the author may object to the disclosure of his work without his consent, or request that his name be explicitly mentioned in the event of disclosure.
Property Rights
The Property Rights give the author the monopoly of economic exploitation of his work:
- they allow him to oppose any commercial exploitation of his work
- they have a limited duration of 70 years from the death of the author. This deadline passed, the work enters the public domain, giving everyone the possibility of exploiting it
- to be protected, works must be realized: concepts, ideas and methods are not protected
Copyright
In countries applying the « common law » such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the Copyright materialized by the symbol © , protects the work itself, but not its author like in French law. It defines the way in which the author or his acquirer can protect the exploitation of the work. It is a kind of commercial law.
Copyright allows the rightholder to transfer temporarily or permanently to a third party all or part of his rights for:
- reproduction of the work
- creation of derivative works
- distribution of copies (for sale, loan, advertising…)
- public performance of the work
If we analyze the situation, we see that only the equivalent of French property rights is recognized by copyright.
Author’s Rights VS Copyright
Literary and artistic works are protected by Author’s Rights in France, without any formality in all signatory countries of the Berne Convention for the protection of literary and artistic works.
A French author will therefore automatically be granted the same rights as the authors of the country in which his work will be exploited, provided that this country is a signatory to the agreement.
The list of countries can be consulted on the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Concretely, in France, the simple fact of affixing the symbol © next to a work serves rather as an international sign indicating that a photo is protected by French Author’s Rights, than a real protection, because with the copyright the economic rights of the author are limited, and his moral rights are not recognized.
It is better to use in the copyright notice the name of the author and the date of creation of the work. Example: the bottom of each page on the AbsurdePhoton site includes « © 2016-20xx AbsurdePhoton » [2016 being the date of creation of the site, 20xx being the year of last update].
Citation Right and Fair Use
The Citation Right ( « Droit de Citation » in French) of an image is not well-defined by French law. The size of the images that can be used is subject to several jurisprudences depending on the cases judged and the stakeholders.
Be aware that there is still a certain tolerance if you want to reuse an image, but only if it is considered beneficial to society, as an illustration of:
- a constructive critique
- an academic article
- enlightened comments
- a teaching
- etc...
The term « Fair Use » is the copyright equivalent of the French Citation Right.
Display of Author’s Rights on the site
In view of all that has been written above, here are the arrangements I have made on the website:
- images in articles include mentions indicating title and author. I use my own photos as much as possible in the articles, but this is not always possible, in this case the author is explicitly indicated. Some images for which the provenance is not known are tagged as « unknown » author - if you know who the author is, contact me immediately so I can make the required modifications
- the photos in the Photo Galleries are exclusively the property of , and therefore require an agreement if you want to use them elsewhere than on the original site. Each photo from my galleries is watermarked with my monogram, and contains metadata
- the photos and images used in the menus and sections are either my property, or images from image banks on the internet with a « libre license » symbolized by the logo 🄯 called « Copyleft » (an example of a libre license is the Creative Commons License) - there again, if you notice an error contact me immediately so I can make the required modifications
- I can tolerate a reuse of a reduced size version of my photos according to the principles of Fair Use explained above - in this case I prefer to have the information directly from you via the contact page
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An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.
Edgard Varese