Bug#487218: games-thumbnails: unclear copyright concerns

[Francesco Poli]

On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:43:47 +0000 (GMT) Miriam Ruiz wrote:

[...]
> I'm not exactly sure of the copyright and licensing issues of screenshots of games in general.

I tend to think that a screenshot of a game is a derivative work of
that game, at least of the game graphics files.
If this is true, each screenshot is copyrighted by the copyright
holder(s) of the game (graphics), as well as (possibly) by the person
who took the screenshot[1].
Moreover, again if the above is true, the screenshot has to be licensed
in a manner allowed by the license of the game (graphics).

[1] his/her (not huge) creative input was choosing when to take the
screenshot, and, possibly, how to get to the game situation in which
the screenshot was taken...

> I know that in some countries there's something call Fair Use which I'm not really sure I fully understand, but that won't apply to some others.

Conventional wisdom on debian-legal seems to be that the Debian Project
cannot rely on fair use (or fair dealing or other similar legal
disciplines that apply to other jurisdictions) in order to comply with
the DFSG, because fair use provides very very limited rights and varies
wildly across jurisdictions.

AFAIK, there are only very few limited cases where fair use is
exploited to achieve DFSG-freeness.  Fortune cookies come to mind,
several of which are short quotations of other people's works, with
proper credit: however the right to properly-credited quotations seems
to be present in virtually all jurisdictions, being included in the
Berne Convention[2].

[2] http://wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#P144_26032

Important disclaimers:
IANAL, TINLA, IANADD, TINASOTODP.

> 
> Could someone out there help clarify those issues, please?

I hope mine is a useful contribution.
What I don't fully understand is: what is the purpose of the
games-thumbnails package?

[...]
> PS: I'm CCing this bug report both to the Debian Games Team mailing list and to Debian Legal, to see if anyone there can clarify the issue.

I interpret this as a request to send my reply to you, to the bug
submitter, to the bug address, and to the two lists.
Please correct me, if I'm wrong.


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..................................................... Francesco Poli .
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