What is the copyright status of game screenshots? Game art is under copyright of the designer or their company. When I play the game and take a screenshot, whose is the copyright? Mine, because I played the game to that point and created the screenshot file; The designer or their company, because they made the art?
The designer/company owns the copyright to the original work, you own the copyright in the derivative work (the screenshot). However, your work is subject to whatever rights your license to use the game gives you and fair use/fair dealing. An example of a company attempting to enforce copyright from screenshots/screen recordings can be seen by the Nintendo Creators Program.
It Depends If the person reusing the image (lets call that person R for reuser) is not complying with the terms of the Creative commons license, which include a requirement to provide attribution of the source work, then R cannot rely on the license, and the granting of the license ad the presence of a license declaration is legally irrelevant. R must have some other basis to reuse the image. This could be an exception to copyright, such as fair use or fair dealing. Or possibly the image is not protected by copyright, for example because its copyright has expired, or because it is a work of the US Federal Government being used in the US. In the absence of such a basis, R is infringing copyright. In much of the world copyright now lasts for 70 years after the death of the author (or of all co-authors). In some different terms apply, ranging from life+50 to life+100. Sound recordings and photos get shorter terms in some countries. In the US the term is life+70 for recent works, but for work created and published before 1978 more complex rules apply, depending on the date of publication, and whether laws on notice and renewal were complied with. See the well-known chart Copyright Term and the Public Domain for the various cases and when copyright expires in each case. The question asks about fair use. This is a US-specific legal concept. It is designed to be flexible, an is highly fact-dependent. As a result it is rarely possible to say if a use will qualify as a fair use with certainty until a court passes on it. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? for more on fair use. Not providing attribution is itself often considered to weigh against fair use. The question does not give enough detail to make even a good guess as to whether such a use is likely to be held to be fair use. Identifying the kind of eagle has some educational value, which might favor fair use to some extent, but must be considered in light of the overall purpose of the use, which is not described. There is no indication as to whether the original work is creative or factual, or whether the reuse would be likely to harm the market for the original. Much use of images on social media does not stand up under a fair use analysis. Providing proper attribution might well help any fair use claim. See also Do you have to give attribution if an image falls under Creative Commons?
All artistic and literary work has copyright at the moment of creation This includes things “built” in Minecraft. However, under the terms of the Minecraft licence you give a wide ranging copyright licence to Mojang: If you make any content available on or through our Game, you agree to give us permission to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, and publicly display that content. This permission is irrevocable, and you also agree to let us permit other people to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, and publicly display your content. You are not giving up your ownership rights in your content, you are just giving us and other users permission to use it.
Yes, such a site can be created without infringing copyright Facts about the game are facts.They are not protected by copyright. Criticism of, and comment about the game, is an activity protected by the US First Amendment. Making such comments is very likely to be fair use under US copyright law. In general the author of a work, such as a book or a game, or the maker of a product, has no right to grant or withhold permission to discuss or comment on the work. This is true not only under US law, but also in the law of most countries (perhaps of all countries). The name of the game might well be protected as a trademark. But that does not allow the trademark owner to prevent discussion of the game, clearly identified by the name of of the game. As long as nothing is being sold or rented, or advertised for sale or rental under that name, and there is no attempt to claim that the site is sponsored or approved by the trademark owner, and there is no likelihood of confusion, there is no trademark infringement. This is true under US law, and under the trademark laws of most other countries. A wiki is a specific technology. It can be used for community discussion, or for a company's internal documentation, or for any of many other purposes. Wikipedia has popularized this technology. Not all community discussion sites are wikis, however, nor are all wikis for community discussion. Just as not all novels are books printed on paper, and not all books are novels. In any case, setting up a wiki about a topic such as a game, a movie, or a novel does not require permission from the owner or creator of the game or of any trademarks associated with the game or work. The same would be true for a discussion forum about such a game or work that is not a wiki. If a wiki uses excessive quotes from game dialog, or uses the game's logo without permission, or reproduces other game assets, such as character art, maps, and the like without permission, that might be copyright infringement.
Simply admitting that the images are not yours does not give you the right to use them. The fact that you are not profitting from them does not change this. There is no magical statement or disclaimer that will change this. If your use of the images constitutes Fair Use (since you're not mentioning how you're using them, it probably doesn't), you can include a fair use disclaimer. Sample dislaimers can be found online. A disclaimer should include the following: A statement that the work in question is not yours That the use falls under Fair Use and why Section 107 of the copyright act
It's still under copyright, so you'd need to contact the publisher for permission, although if the artist (or in this case the executor of the estate Lynn Caponera) still retains the rights to the work sometimes going straight to the them can be a better option, especially in this case as it's for a non-profit and for a library in particular. The library also might have certain rights for reproduction, they generally pay a bulk fee to publishers but outside lending I'm not sure what that covers, so I'd check with the library manager (either branch or regional depending on who handles legal and licensing) as well.
The argument would have to be either a derivative work under copyright, or a trade dress/trademark claim. Neither sounds very solid at all. Neither copyright nor trade dress/trademark protect ideas like a TV format. They can only protect very similar expressions of an idea that necessarily flow one from the other and, for example, the game mechanics can't be protected by copyright.
It is a fact that a particulate chess game was played on a particular date by certain specific players, who made specific moves. Facts are not protected by copyright. Anyone is free to report such a game, including the exact moves, and the names of the players. Such games are often used in books about chess, and the same thing is done in books about other games, such as bridge and go, where a record of the play is often kept. If someone else has described or analyzed such a game, you may not copy that person's wording without permission (except to the limited extent permitted by fair use or fair dealing). A chess diagram simply represents the position of the pieces in a standard way, and has no original content beyond those facts, and so is not protected by copyright either. If a person has invented a chess game or a series of chess moves that never took place to illustrate a point in analyzing chess, re-using that sequence of moves might make the new analysis a derivative work of the previous one, if the coverage of the invented sequence of moves is extensive. But that would not apply to the moves of an actual game that was actually played. There have even been cases of fictional stories based upon real historical chess games. For example &quot;Unicorn Variation&quot; by Roger Zelezney. 17 USC 102 says: In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. This is the &quot;fact/expression distinction&quot; by which it is said that facts are not protected by copyright, although the form of expressing those facts often is. The same section has the list of kinds of protected works. This includes literary, dramatic, musical, and pictorial works, dance, audiovisual, sound and architectural works. A chess game does not fall into any of those categories. Thus it is ineligible form protection on two separate but related grounds. Beyond that, under the Feist vs Rural decision, a work must have an element of originality to be protected by copyright, and a list of the moves made by chess players has no original content, although an analysis of a game would. The copyright laws of many other countries have been interpreted similarly. As to the question of offense, in the US at least, and in most other countries, a true statement is never legally defamatory, even if the subject dislikes it. If it is true that Player X lost to Player Y on such and such a date, reporting that fact cannot be libel or any form of defamation. Otherwise the loser could never be named in any sports reporting.