Mark sez, "If you visit the huge Lightning Field in southwestern New Mexico, you're allowed to stay overnight (one night) and generally experience the place. But you're not allowed to take any pictures while you're there. (Because, you know, it would cut into… what… postcard sales? I don't get it)"
Photography Restrictions
The Lightning Field is protected by copyright. Photography of the sculpture and the cabin is not permitted. Commissioned, copyrighted slides are available for $30.00 per set of 8, plus $2.00 shipping and handling. To purchase a set of slides, send a check made payable to Dia Art Foundation to our New Mexico office in Corrales. Please note that these photographic images are for personal or educational use only and their publication is prohibited without written consent from Dia Art Foundation.
This appears to be entirely about slide/postcard sales, and it's shameful that the Lightning Field people feel the need to misrepresent the legality of taking pictures of their bit of dirt. There is no such thing as a field that is "protected by copyright." Copyright protects an original creative expression, not geography.
The scam here is that a condition of your entry to their land is that you're not allowed to take pics — it's a contract printed in fine-print on your ticket or a nearby sign. Since the only photos of their land are ones that they hold copyright in (there's copyright in pictures of geography, not in geography itself), they can charge monopoly prices for postcards.
It's their right to impose stupid, oppressive conditions on people who visit their dirt. But it's really sleazy for them to make up all this junk about copyrighted dirt — if they're in business to run a tawdry penny-postcard scam, they should have the guts to say so.
Meanwhile, if you're not standing on their land (and therefore have formed no agreement with them), there's nothing to stop you from taking all the pics you want, and putting them up under a Creative Commons license that undermines the penny-postcard racket.
(Thanks, Mark!)
Update: Many have written to point out that the Lightning Fields grounds comprise an art installation, which *is* copyrightable. But the point still sounds — installing art in a field doesn't make the field copyrighted. What's more, copyright doesn't prohibit noncommercial personal photography of a work, nor photography for the purpose of criticism, nor the incidental capture of art in a photograph of, for example, lightning (or a photo of your pal standing on a particular patch of dirt making a funny face).