Why You Can’t Photograph the Eiffel Tower at Night: Copyright Rules

Once the sun sets over Paris, the Eiffel Tower is lit in a dazzling display of 20,000 sparkling lights until 11 p.m. (or 1 a.m. during the summer). The show, which occurs nightly at the famous landmark, is not only a perfect calling card for the City of Light but also a social media gold mine, attracting camera phones like moths to a flame. But every person who’s posted a sparkling Boomerang to Instagram or a video to TikTok probably doesn’t know that they’ve broken the law.

Mais oui! It all comes down to good old-fashioned copyright law, which states that monuments in Europe are protected for the lifespan of the work’s legal creator, plus 70 years. So, what does this mean for your social accounts?

How the Copyright Law Impacts Tourists

While the Eiffel Tower itself, the creator of which died in 1923, is fair game, the light show, created in 1985, is still protected work.

This means the Eiffel Tower itself is in the public domain, meaning that during daylight hours, it’s totally legal for you to share as many photos as you’d like. But because the light show remains a protected work under European copyright law, it is illegal to profit from photographs of the illuminated Eiffel Tower. For example, tourists cannot sell such photos to magazines or other commercial outlets. Tourists in Paris can, however, post to social media.

And while it’s not technically illegal for you to take photos of the monument day or night, you could, in theory, be hit with a cease and desist if you share a photo of the light show without permission. You could always snap a photo of the darkened building at night for your IG story, but really, what’s the fun in that?

How and Where to Share Your Photos

There is good news for tourists, though. You probably don’t need to worry if you’re only trying to get a good shot for Instagram. The effort to bring legal action against the everyday social media user would be too big a burden to be worth the effort.

However, if you want to publish images of the tower all lit up anywhere official or for commercial use, you’ll want to get permission from the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (the company that owns and operates the tower).

As the Société notes on the Eiffel Tower’s official website, “Photographing the Eiffel Tower at night is not illegal at all. Any individual can take photos and share them on social networks. But the situation is different for professionals. The Eiffel Tower’s lighting and sparkling lights are protected by copyright, so professional use of images of the Eiffel Tower at night requires prior authorization and may be subject to a fee.”

So go ahead, snap and share.