Saturday, December 31, 2011

The rue de Rivoli revisited

Yet another video online … this one a new strolling tour of the rue de Rivoli. I already have a video that covers the western end of this rather long street that slices through central Paris, but I've added another video that shows the eastern end, from the rue du Louvre (right next to the Louvre) to the place de la Bastille. The rue de Rivoli merges into the rue Saint-Antoine right around the rue de Sévigné, which then continues on to the Bastille. It's a nice walk with lots of people. I filmed it just after sunset, because it has kind of a nice atmosphere (the other video was during the day). In fact, the streets were a bit damp, giving them that Miami-Vice look.

The rue de Rivoli is quite long, and very straight for a significant part of its length. The rumor is that it functions as an impromptu drag strip at times in the wee hours, but I haven't walked it during the wee hours to verify that. The western end is pretty consistent, with multiple blocks of arcades and businesses like restaurants and tourist shops as it runs parallel to the north side of the Louvre. After the Louvre, there's a much larger variety of shops and businesses on both sides of the street, and a lot of pedestrian traffic, and far fewer souvenir and tourist shops.

The street eventually passes Châtelet, then the Hôtel de Ville—Paris City Hall—which at this time of year has an ice rink in it … and that justifies a slight digression. They were playing music at the rink, so I didn't include it in the video. Why? Because every time you put music in a YouTube video, you risk being flagged by copyright trolls. Now, the incidental capture of music in a video is normally an instance of fair use under U.S. copyright law (17 USC § 107), and may also be non-infringing on de minimis grounds. But try telling YouTube that. There are a lot of companies on YouTube that make fraudulent or invalid infringement claims just to “monetize” videos that they don't own, at the expense of the actual video creators. I want to avoid that kind of scam, so if there's a significant amount of music captured incidentally in a video, I often remove it, or just edit out the part with the music (I did the same thing for my video on dancing on the Seine, and my Luxembourg Gardens video). Unfortunate but true.

Moving right along … well, after skipping about 150 feet of the street to avoid that music, I continue on. There are lots of nice shops in a very nice atmosphere east of City Hall, and there's an open market on the place Baudoyer on some days, although it was winding down at the time I walked past. There's a large semi-pedestrian zone where the rue Saint-Antoine moves towards and merges with the rue de Rivoli a bit beyond that. Further east the pedestrian traffic quiets down a bit, then picks up again around the place de la Bastille, where is where this video stops. The video closes with a view of and from the huge Opéra Bastille, the city-block-sized replacement for the Opéra Garnier (at least for grand opera).

Someday I'll continue east from the place de la Bastille with another strolling video, since there is much to see down that way, too.

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