BoingBoing has a piece today about a guy named Steve who was taken into custody by police because he wouldn’t stop taking photographs of San Francisco’s public transit system until he was told what law he was breaking by doing so. As the security guards and cops couldn’t cite a law, they just hauled him in and gave him a hard time.
Here’s Steve’s blog post about the incident. (He has kind of a funny entry directed towards blog spammers, too. It’s as if he thinks people are spamming blogs manually…)
A reader named Jen wrote in to BoingBoing with a link to this explanation of a photographer’s rights. It, handily, can be downloaded and printed. It’s probably a good idea for photographers in the US to have this document on them at all times, unfortunately.
(Speaking of legislation against photographers, BoingBoing has also been following the story of how people in Chicago are not allowed to take pictures of a piece of art downtown because it is copyrighted. Much like the Eiffel Tower. Come on. Copyrighting is just spinning completely out of control. What’s next, fines for people who mention a corporation’s name without permission?)