Screenshots and copyright? What do you think?

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Simon Dismore
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Location: London, UK

Screenshots and copyright? What do you think?

Unread post by Simon Dismore »

I'm looking for feedback on licensing the UI of our application so that screenshots can be freely used anywhere, even though the application itself is non-free.

I was reminded about this while looking at Help & Manual's Wikipedia article, which is illustrated with the screenshot below. The image has to be illegibly small to satisfy Wikipedia's rules for non-free software screenshots.
Help_Manual_5.png
Help_Manual_5.png (103.59 KiB) Viewed 7757 times
It turns out that most proprietary software comes with restrictions about how screenshots can be used (e.g. Adobe's policy, Microsoft's policy). To create a free screenshot that can be uploaded at full size, Wikimedia commons advises:
  1. "Use a free program with a completely free skin. (A KDE Program using Crystal images is an example.) If you are using an operating system with a non-free theme (like Windows), make sure it fits something like {{PD-ineligible}}, e.g. has only flat-colored backgrounds and buttons and no complex icons. See Commons:Threshold of originality for examples of images, or image modifications or other actions considered trivial or non-trivial in different countries.
  2. "Cut away all possibly copyrighted elements. Only show the relevant content.
  3. "The content of the screenshot must be free too. Make sure the screenshot does not contain unfree text or images.
  4. "If the screenshot contains photos or other works (e.g. a shot of Wikipedia's main page), be sure to mention and follow the terms of each license."
The result is a screenshot that can be used at full size anywhere without any difficulty.

In respect of their first point my idea is to have the skin (the UI) be re-usable under cc-by-sa-4, explain that everything apart from the OS and browser chrome is freely republishable, and to post a notice to this effect on the product website. I fully understand this means someone could mess about with the screenshot in distasteful ways and then republish it, but it seems to me that having my product more widely seen than my rivals is a benefit that outweighs the risk.

What do you think? All comments are welcome.

Thanks.
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waldemar.hersacher
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Re: Screenshots and copyright? What do you think?

Unread post by waldemar.hersacher »

Hi Simon,

the copyright is different in different countries. In the European Community (EC) there was a harmonisation which should be now realised in all EC countries. The standard is that you have all rights. The US copyright is the other way. You need to make a statement not to give away the rights. That is the reason why you nearly always see the remark "All rights reserved".

Adding a statement like Adobe or Microsoft to your product license will give your user a good feeling. The only restrictions not covered by law are "beta products or other products that have not been commercially released" and "You may not alter the screenshot in any way except to resize it. Your use must contain the entire screenshot. You may not use portions of the screenshot, and no portions of a screenshot may be included in your product user interface.".

Others are at least in the EC covered by law like the obscene and pornographic, identifying individuals or the trademark things.

"You may not use portions of the screenshot" is a good restriction in the way to have the screenshot associated with your product because it will contain the title bar with the product logo.

The CC license is:
too long
too complicated

I didn't understand it. It's more a lawer text than a simple person text.
Waldemar
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