The Eiffel Tower and Copyright

The Eiffel Tower and Copyright

Completed on March 31, 1889, in record time — 2 years, 2 months, and 5 days — the Eiffel Tower was supposed to be demolished just 20 years after its inauguration. Gustave Eiffel, aware of the threat, used creativity to save his work: he made the space available for scientific experiments and, above all, offered the structure as a support for a wireless transmission antenna, making it strategically indispensable. What was provisional became eternal.

The Tower was not unanimously welcomed. Parisian artists, writers, and intellectuals fiercely protested the project, calling it an "iron skeleton" and an "ugly blot" on the city's landscape. Guy de Maupassant himself reportedly lunched daily at the Tower's restaurant — the only place in Paris from which it could not be seen. Time, of course, proved Eiffel right.

The design of the Eiffel Tower and its copyrights originally belonged to Gustave Eiffel. With his death in 1923, the legal countdown began: after 70 years, the rights fell into the public domain. That happened in 1993 — which explains the abundance of souvenirs, miniatures, and replicas freely sold around the world, from the keychains of Parisian street vendors to the iconic tower in Las Vegas. Photographing, reproducing, or commercializing the image of the Tower during the day is, therefore, entirely free.

But there is a surprising detail: photographing the Eiffel Tower at night can be illegal. The lights that illuminate the monument were installed only in 1985 and are legally considered an autonomous artistic work, protected by copyright. Thus, any photo or video of the Tower with the lights on is, legally speaking, a reproduction of a protected artistic work. For strictly personal use — a memory stored on a phone — there is no problem. The risk arises when the image is used for commercial or professional purposes, or when it is published on social media in a way that may characterize distribution.

The European Union recognizes the principle of Freedom of Panorama: a provision that allows photographing and filming architectural works and sculptures permanently located in public spaces, without infringing copyright. In theory, this would protect the tourist who snaps the Tower at night to keep as a memento.

However, application of that directive is optional — and France chose not to incorporate it into its national legislation. Brazil, in turn, adopted the principle through Article 48 of the Copyright Law (Law 9,610/98), which provides that works permanently located in public places may be freely represented.

Even with such exception, however, commercial use may give rise to risks if the exploitation looks less like a photograph of a public space and more like an economic appropriation of the work itself.

Gustave Eiffel's story is also a story about creation, authorship, and time. He designed a work meant to last 20 years and which now spans centuries. He created a symbol that, after decades of legal protection, became part of the heritage of all humanity — except for a luminous detail, installed almost a century later, which still bears the signature of its creators.

Thus, the Eiffel Tower is, at the same time, public domain and protected work — free by day, reserved by night. An almost poetic metaphor for a monument that reinvented itself in order to survive.