>> Legal and private entities that use the emblem and the name of the City of Sarajevo...
With the word "and" in there, I'm thinking this is more about protecting the emblem. Using an emblem (not a flag) of a government entity in certain ways might be construed as conveying something to the content. In other words, putting the emblem along with the name of the city might lead people to think a web page was produced on behalf of the city. I seriously doubt using the name of the city like in the blog is a problem.
I suspect in regard Sarajevo the author is deliberately making the situation sound more absurd than it really is. Having said that, I think his point regarding architectural works is valid. Publishing pictures of publicly visible objects - and buildings in particular - should not have legal hinderances.
He is making it absurd. In the article the author claims that he cannot name the city of Sarajevo and that view is of course bullshit. You can always write about something. The article's title is plain wrong, as is its introduction.
Using the name (in a sense of making it your own or using if for something you sell) is a whole different matter though. The city of Sarajevo might not have a strong obligation to protect its name as say a music label defending their name against a computer company, but still they city has good reason to check on those things.
Having said that, the city is of course morally wrong to use this power on a simple facebook page with vintage photos. They probably have a problem with some photos of times they rather want to forget (I see a photo from 1941 and IIRC that was under Nazi-occupation (stupid Italians, why would anyone ever want the balcans?))
If anything, the city should have invited the page's admins to their own tourist bureau, help them and make sure they know some basic rules about copyright (like not using photos with a Getty images watermark. seriously?).
So obviously it's protected speech in the title of an article, but obviously it's not protected speech in the title of a facebook group? I don't think the distinction here is as strong as you imply.
The facebook page is a legal (or rather private) entity as described in the city's law, an article about the city of Sarajevo is not. If you write a book about the city, the book is not a legal entity and you'll be fine using "Sarajevo" in the title. If you name your publishing house "Sarajevo books" it is a legal entity and you might want to talk with the city first.
Facebook page cannot be a "legal entity". Further, legal entities may be as well private entities.
Legal entities are created by governments, either as governmental organizations (persons on paper) or as companies and various types of associations (private persons on paper).
Facebook page may be opened up by such legal entity, but itself does not constitute such.
So why is there no clause in the law that states this specifically. Legally, clear as day, it's written. If the city wishes to allow it, they should amend the law to say so. If they don't, that's as good as affirmation of their perogative, especially now with this publicity.
Furthermore, the motivation to do that might be helped by the authors exposure of their tactics, justifying any sensationalism. No lies are written in this article.
Even if only for pedantic reasons, a law should clearly state it's interpretation. Leaving it up to arbitrary discretion is a slippery slope, and a good way to find yourself in a censorship situation.
It's all unreasonable and paranoia until you get a cease-and-decist.
I think the reason for that is the Eastern Sarajevo that is used as name by Serbs, so that is why main Sarajevo tries to forbid using name and emblem together.
If law says "name and emblem" than it applies to both together. And it certainly cannot forbid people in other countries doing so, that applies for Bosnia only or for some countries having international relations with them.
Try to forbid it in Uganda or Congo, it will not work like that.
Absurdity is a valid method of handling the frequently-asked question "Okay, they want control of XYZ, why is that so bad?" regarding all XYZ — in this case, the brand a city perceives it has authority to control.
Don't forget it is the voters who gave the city this power. Laws can be changed by the next government.
It would be interesting to know the history of the law's article 21. As a programmer I'm used to the transparency of my code repo and who contributed which bit. Is git-driven law-making utopian?
Author of the article here, and I wish for the same.
This country contains the laws on the national level, on the "state" (called entities) / district level, one of the "states" has canton-level laws, and then there's a local level. However, if you start moving between the two entities and the district (a relatively minor part of the population moves from one entity to the other), the line gets really blurry.
On top of that, the laws themselves are really not available in one place. They're scattered across different websites (you'll notice that the city's statue and the law I've mentioned aren't linking to the same domain), in different formats, in different local "languages" (it's a same language, we just call it differently for political reasons), and sometimes they are scanned PDFs.
It's a country with less than 4 million citizens, separated into two entities + one district, three official "languages", three presidents (no, I'm not joking, Bosnia & Herzegovina has three presidents), some international entities that guarantee the peace in the country...
And while that utopian wish of Git-driven law-making seems unreachable here, the best middle-ground solution I have is to scrape a third-party resource containing most (but not all) of the laws in PDFs, and then searching through those 200ish PDF documents I've scraped (totaling at 233 MB) locally multiple times with different variations of the word I'm looking for.
As an example, the term "article 1" could be found as "član 1", "članak 1", "члан 1", "clan 1" and "clanak 1" in different PDFs I've collected, and even if I search through all of the variations of the term I'm looking for, there's still a chance that the term I'm looking for might be scanned, and therefore unsearchable. And good luck to anyone who tries to find a OCR tool that understands Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian and works well enough to process scans of legal documents in shitty quality.
I'd buy into the FUD a little more if the author had redacted the name for real instead of adding a black background color to black text. Selecting the text reveals the name. Obviously that's not going to fool a crawler.
As I have said in an other comment on this thread, the idea is that the city's name is easily discoverable.
You can discover it by highlighting the text, clicking at the button at the bottom of the article, and by following the Wikipedia links in the first paragraph.
I highly doubt that this decision could be upheld in the court. If they want to sue me, I'm ready to "pay for the damage caused" and face legal consequences. Casual Facebook users that are administering Facebook's pages are probably not ready to face the same consequences.
And, since this is my blog, the only third party that could remove the mentions of the name without my consent is my hosting provider (arguably better protection than Facebook offers), but if they do so, I will put on a server on the Raspberry Pi and continue with the distribution.
I am not a lawyer, but I think you are the missing point of Decision about the usage of the emblem, name and the flag of the City of Sarajevo.
Article 7 states that "... legal persons may be granted to use the name Sarajevo in a business (company) name or product name, provided their business activity doesn't harm and helps affirm its reputation."
You using the name Sarajevo in a blog post or its title clearly doesn't violate this rule.
That said, it's beyond me why someone from the city government would decide to enforce this rule on a FB page, unless it's being heavily monetized.
The only time he mentions article 7 is that "every derivation of the name is implied, including every abbreviation of the word Sarajevo." So okay, article 7 doesn't apply to a non-monetised blog post. The other articles in "Komisija za Statut I akte" still do, right?
But okay, so implicitly you're suggesting OP has widened the scope, because it seems like a FB page being monetised could be considered a "product name", and therefore article 7 does apply, and this is the basis of the legal threat. That being so, where does the demand for money come in? Is that the cost of being granted to use the name? And what exactly is stopping the city from going after things not covered by article 7?
Any law is that vague and wide-reaching has the potential to be abused, and this is no different. Better to clarify it sooner rather than later.
Article 4 defines that usage of coat of arms of Sarajevo in the stamp may be granted to private businesses, public companies, public institutions and other legal entities.
Article 5 defines that usage of coat of arms of Sarajevo on public transportation vehicles, fleet vehicles, billboards, brochures and other advertising materials may be granted to the said group of legal entities.
Article 6 defines that the usage of coat of arms on logos and decorations may be granted to the said group of legal entities.
The annual fees for legal entities using the name and/or coat of arms of Sarajevo depend on the entity size and are defined in Article 17 (50-2400 Euros).
This Decision fails to define any terms of usage of coat of arms and name for natural persons. Natural persons are only mentioned in Articles 21 in 22, stating the penalties for the usage of name and/or coat of arms without a proper approval from the city government.
Again, not a lawyer, but in my view anything except the usage of name Sarajevo and its coat of arms in the names of legal entities and their products, stamps and logos is outside of scope this Decision.
Purely speculating, but perhaps somebody from the city government decided it is time to optimise a revenue stream, which is now 12 years old (the Decision was published in 2006). If they continue harassing people on the Internet, there is going to be more of a coordinated backlash and sooner or later they will have to amend the Decision.
This law clearly would not be enforceable in the the US (you can’t start trying to enforce a trademark that you haven’t been defending and that is in wide use).
Having said that, there is recent precedent where FB differentially enforces foreign laws, apparently for their own political/financial reasons.
For example, Palestinian political speech about Israeal is subject to much harsher censorship rules than Israeli speech about Palestine.
So, this case really boils down to how much FB values its political/financial ties to the city of Sarajevo.
Hello Aleksandar, I hope you live somewhere Sarajevo's rule does not apply (e.g. anywhere else on this planet) and that you just happened to write this while just visiting there.
I was the first local to talk about certain government entities in Bosnia & Herzegovina buying FinFisher software. I was the first to talk about the government testing Hacking Team software as well. Later on, I've worked on Panama Papers. And now, I wrote this.
I am also far from laying low, as I have been a guest in two TV shows talking about my line of interest in the last two years (one for the local TV station in <REDACTED>, one on Al Jazeera Balkans, that aired to the entire country + Serbia and Croatia), and asked some tricky questions to the government representatives multiple times in open panels.
The point that I'm trying to make is that I'm pretty sure I've pissed off some part of the country's government multiple (if not dozens of) times. And while I do take a higher level of precaution compared to the average Joe (VPNs, Tor, Signal etc.), I have so far not received any legal complaint, nor have I ever felt threatened.
The "and" is probably a large error, "legal and public" would be excluded, meaning public companies - who are probably the target of the law - in theory are not affected.
Whether that matters depends on the legal background in B&H, similar errors in UK law have proved costly in the past.
It's translated so you can't draw that conclusion from the text. But I think it is likely that it only protects the emblem, or the name when used in conjunction with the emblem.
With the word "and" in there, I'm thinking this is more about protecting the emblem. Using an emblem (not a flag) of a government entity in certain ways might be construed as conveying something to the content. In other words, putting the emblem along with the name of the city might lead people to think a web page was produced on behalf of the city. I seriously doubt using the name of the city like in the blog is a problem.
I suspect in regard Sarajevo the author is deliberately making the situation sound more absurd than it really is. Having said that, I think his point regarding architectural works is valid. Publishing pictures of publicly visible objects - and buildings in particular - should not have legal hinderances.