Category:Scarecrow festivals in the United Kingdom

Note from an uploader

Regarding the legality of photographs of exhibits at scarecrow festivals in the United Kingdom, which are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The United Kingdom has Panoramafreiheit, which, as I understand it, permits photography of scarecrows. United Kingdom law takes intention into consideration. It permits photography from the public highway of permanent items, items which may be considered de minimis, and creations by people who are not craftspersons or artists, and have not intended their creations as artworks. Scarecrows are effigies, i.e. non-commercial creations which are intentionally temporary and often crude representations of humans, animals and other things, and are intended for imminent dismantling or destruction. Whether or not they may be considered to have copyright, such effigies can be photographed under Panoramafreiheit in the UK.

Scarecrow effigies are temporary objects made for fun by anonymous villagers or townspeople and their children, and in general such a group is not considered as a whole to be an artist group with special skills for artworks. The effigies do not in themselves have a commercial value. In general, money for a village charity or for community benefit is made at scarecrow festivals by sales of a map or plan of the "scarecrow trail" i.e. a guide to the site of each exhibit within the village or town, and that 2D copyright graphic map is not reproduced on Commons. Money is not made directly from the exhibits themselves.

Consideration of intention is a large part of the structure of British law. British copyright is created for the protection of potential financial rights of the creator to the made object, i.e. it has a commercial intention. However, scarecrow effigies in UK scarecrow festivals have no commercial intention, therefore photographs taken of such effigies do not impinge on the creator's rights. When such photographs are uploaded to Commons under a free commercial-use licence, the creators have full use of those photographs anyway, so they lose nothing, and gain commercial opportunities from the photographs long after their temporary creations were destroyed. Scarecrow festival organisers in the UK tend to encourage photography of the exhibits in public places, because they can use the free-licence photos, and the publication of those photos is good publicity for them, anyway. Storye book (talk) 08:47, 21 April 2024 (UTC)