Post by Perona on Jan 14, 2020 13:31:24 GMT -8
Hello everyone.
I'm just wondering about the limits of "fair use" and "personal use" when it comes to using images for your own Forum, even if for non-commercial purposes. My apologies if it's a long post/TL;DR, (you don't have to read if you don't want).
You shouldn't be using artwork in a way that its license doesn't allow, however I've seen that sometimes people use pictures, (sometimes slightly transformative), with elements that are obviously copyrighted, E.g: Cropping Terminator and putting him in a background with some text, then use it in your Forum.
I'd say there's 3 ways of not getting in trouble while doing this: the first would be appealing to "fair use"; the second if it's supposedly used as permitted, (in this case, for "personal use"); and the third is if the copyright owner doesn't care and doesn't bother to take action. However I have some doubts.
Firs of all, there's Wallpaper sites that provide such media, and even though it's supposedly for "personal use", the term is not properly defined. This is because it supposedly refers to that which is not used for business purposes, but for "personal" enjoyment.
But there's a problem with that, because it could be used to gain money/popularity indirectly. If I use a cool movie wallpaper on my site, I may be able to attract more followers/members because of it, and indirectly end up with profit if they buy my merchandise for example, I.e: because of the effort of the copyright owner. They probably intended people to use it as a desktop background, not to use it as means of gaining popularity.
The question here, is what do you understand for "personal use" and what does it permit you to do? Can you use it for your website even if non-commercially, but end up benefitting from it, (exposure/indirect purchases)?
Second, I'm not even going to bother going into detail about "fair use", because it's really a grey area, and we all already know about the 4 factors.
But do you think someone could appeal to this concept if they use for example a Nintendo-game picture for their site, and it's purely non-commercial? Do you think you could get into trouble for this?
I'm not a copyright lawyer, nor do I expect anyone to be, but if enough people share their views on this, I may be able to get a better idea of it, at least in some aspects.
