Pictures Frozen Behind a Copyright Gap: Start of Wikimedia Bangladesh’s Collaboration with The Copyright Office

Imagine standing before the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban; Louis Kahn‘s monolithic concrete parliament building rising from an artificial lake at the center of Dhaka. Kahn’s biographer called it “one of the twentieth century’s greatest monuments, and without question Kahn’s magnum opus.” You raise your camera. You take the photograph and then it slowly dawns on you: under Bangladesh’s current copyright law, you cannot freely share that image on Wikimedia Commons.

That realization stayed with me for months. It eventually brought us through the doors of the Bangladesh Copyright Office on June 17, 2026. The Copyright Office confirmed Wikimedia Bangladesh the first formal stakeholder organization for photography and open media in Bangladesh’s copyright policy history.

The Right Bangladesh Once Had and Lost

Freedom of Panorama (often abbreviated as FoP) is a legal provision that gives anyone the right to photograph buildings, monuments, and public artworks in public spaces and share those images freely, including for commercial use. Think of it as common sense turned into law: if a structure stands where anyone can see it, anyone should also be able to photograph and share it, without needing the architect’s permission.

Bangladesh had this right. The Copyright Act, 2000, under Section 72, explicitly allowed photographs of architectural works and sculptures in public spaces to be taken and published without restriction. Bangladeshi contributors to Wikimedia Commons used this for years to document the country’s extraordinary built heritage, from Louis Kahn’s parliament to neighborhood monuments across Dhaka.

Then, in September 2023, a new Copyright Act, 2023 came into force. The Freedom of Panorama provision was gone without explanation and replacement.

The consequences were immediate. Photographs of Bangladeshi buildings and public artworks began disappearing from Wikimedia Commons. When images from Bangladesh’s July Revolution of 2024 were uploaded, over 1,620 files of murals and graffiti that documented a turning point in the country’s history were removed. Images of a nation’s uprising, captured on walls across Dhaka, vanished from the world’s free knowledge repository.

The Journey

I started contributing seriously to Wikimedia projects in August 2024, though my account is over six years old. I am an introvert who forces himself to engage with the world, and in those early months I mostly read policy pages. I came across the outdated Bangladesh copyright page on Wikimedia Commons, flagged with a notice that the new 2023 law was awaiting review.

So I read the law.

What I found surprised me. The Copyright Act 2023 defines two legally distinct concepts. “Architectural work” refers to a physical building, the kind you walk past and photograph. “Architectural artistic work” refers to its design: a floor plan, a blueprint, a scale model. When I looked for “architectural work” in the list of copyright-protected works under Section 14 of the new act, it was not there. Physical buildings did not appear to enjoy copyright protection under the new law at all.

In February 2026, late one night, I sent a voice message to MS Sakib via Telegram, explaining this discovery. Over the following hours, he challenged every assumption, probing every gap in the argument. By the end of our conversation, the reasoning held together. Over the next weeks, MS Sakib helped restructure and finalize a formal proposal, which I submitted to the Wikimedia Commons Village Pump on March 11, 2026.

The discussion that followed was long and substantive. I want to thank JWilz12345 specifically here. His tireless, deeply probing challenges about the Berne Convention, international obligations, and the limits of community interpretation kept the argument rigorous. Without that uncompromising dedication to rigour, I would not have pursued formal advocacy at all. The best kind of pushback can be the most productive collaboration. 

I also recognised that a community discussion alone was not enough. We needed an official response from the government.

On April 7, I emailed the president of Wikimedia Bangladesh asking permission to begin formal advocacy. After the organisation’s monthly executive meeting on April 13, I received the green light and full organisational support. That same day, Yahya and I made our first visit to the Copyright Office, only to find the staff absorbed in World Intellectual Property Day celebrations. They welcomed us warmly, gave us instructions for submitting formal paperwork, and asked us to return.

The months that followed involved a great deal of coordination. I consulted with lawyers and legal experts. NahidSultan helped prepare the formal documents. During the community gathering at the Dhaka Wikimedia Meetup in May 2026, MS Sakib and I discussed the issues at length with the community. By June 14, We had completed writing two formal letters to submit to the Copyright Office on behalf of Wikimedia Bangladesh; one requesting a legal clarification on photographs of architectural works, and one proposing a broader ongoing collaboration.

On June 17, I returned with Delwar Hossain and Yahya. This time, we had a proper meeting.

What Happened in the Meeting

The Copyright Examiner’s opening response addressed the central question directly. Freedom of Panorama had not been removed from the Copyright Act 2023 in order to eliminate the right. It was removed with the intention of transferring those provisions into a separate supplementary “Copyright Rules” act, a subordinate legislation that has not yet been drafted or passed.. Her reading of the current law aligned with the legal analysis we had submitted to the Wikimedia Commons community: until those rules come into force, photography of physical buildings remains permissible under Bangladeshi law. She committed to presenting our formal application to the Copyright Registrar and seeking authorization to issue a written clarification.

The Examiner then raised a point we had not anticipated. The Bangladesh Copyright Office has no registered stakeholders for photography or open media. No organisation representing photographers, videographers, digital platforms, or open-knowledge contributors had ever engaged with the office on copyright matters. As a direct consequence, the office had drafted and reviewed copyright legislation without input from the communities most affected by it, including those whose work had been removed from Wikimedia Commons since 2023.

Wikimedia Bangladesh is now the first organisation to fill that gap. The Examiner confirmed that WMBD will be included in future stakeholder consultations, including those concerning the pending copyright rules act where the FOP provisions are expected to be reintroduced.

The application has been accepted and assigned a tracking number. A formal written response from the Copyright Registrar is expected within one to two months.

What We Achieved

• Legal Analysis & Community Consensus
  In March 2026, we submitted a formal legal analysis of the Copyright Act 2023 to the Wikimedia Commons community. The proposal built a working consensus around Bangladesh’s copyright status for architectural works, the first structured argument of its kind.
• Organisational Backing
  Wikimedia Bangladesh formally endorsed the copyright advocacy effort.
• Stakeholder Consultation
  During the preparation phase, we consulted lawyers, academics, and policy stakeholders across Bangladesh to strengthen the legal and procedural foundations of the application.
• Formal Submission
  On June 14, 2026, two official letters were submitted to the Bangladesh Copyright Office on behalf of Wikimedia Bangladesh; one requesting legal clarification on architectural photography, one proposing an ongoing collaborative relationship.
• First Formal Meeting
  On June 17, 2026, Wikimedia Bangladesh held its first formal meeting with the Bangladesh Copyright Office.
• Stakeholder Status
  Wikimedia Bangladesh is now formally recognized as the first stakeholder organization for photography and open media in Bangladesh’s copyright policy space.

What Comes Next

The Copyright Office is processing our formal request. We expect a written legal clarification within the next few months. Wikimedia Bangladesh has also been promised a seat at the stakeholder meetings that will shape the forthcoming copyright rules, the legislation that could permanently restore Freedom of Panorama to Bangladesh.

We will advocate for clear, broad FoP language covering buildings, public sculptures, and monuments, with no restrictions on commercial use. And we will continue our work on the wider landscape of open knowledge in Bangladesh: public domain digitisation, government licensing, the copyright status of historical documents, and more.

If you are a Wikimedian in Bangladesh, or anywhere and you care about free knowledge: get involved. Attend a meetup. Engage in a copyright discussion. Write to your own country’s copyright office. The global movement for open knowledge grows because people decide to show up. I am very glad we did.