I don't know how it is in other countries but in general in France you cannot just take a picture of a building and put it on Instagram without asking the architect for rights :
> the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitutes, according to the provisions of the article L122-4 of the Code of the intellectual property an act of counterfeit.
I read some year ago that this kind of thing applies to New York as well, that was in the context of an open-world Spider-Man game featuring NY skylines.
France must get a lot of money from all the photos of the Eiffel Tower on the internet. Has anyone been sued/convicted of breaking that and paid reparations?
Fun fact, the Eiffel Tower architecture is not protected since 1990, but the lighting is. So it's illegal to use commercialy a night time photo of the tower[1][2].
I don't think anybody has ever been sued but the SETE (Société d'exploitation de la tour Eiffel) do make money with the image.
This is a separate (but important) issue. The development and effect that tech like this will have on the place of the artist or designer in the future is going to be a similarly seismic shift for the industry, just as the camera and printing press were in their time. This is going to happen more-or-less regardless of what the outcome of the copyright issue is.
