On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 03:40:16PM -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing#Screenshots Screenshots are copyrighted if the displayed program or operating system is copyrighted. For a detailed discussion see http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/publications/copyrightalexmorrisson.htm
The terrible truth about laywers, courtesy of the late Mark MacCormack, is that they'll tell you what's *safe*, not what's *reasonable*.
I'm pretty sure Apple is very proud of its Aqua widgets, and equally sure they'll be after you with a thousand lawyers if you try to claim their graphical designs are owned by you because they happen to be visible in a screenshot you made.
If Apple could find a lawyer who could successfully argue that, because I was *exhibiting* a screenshot of an application that *happened* to be running on a desktop managed with their icon set, that I was "trying to claim their graphical designs are owned by me" -- such exhibition simply *does* *not* make that claim.
If you successfully fend them off, letme know, I could use a bunch of textures, and clipping them from WoW screenshots will save me a lot of time, not to mention Blizzard's artists have better technique than I can muster.
And as an end-user, you can do with any of those things anything you want to, as long as you don't try to distribute them, make money off them, or explicitly claim them as your own.
Copyright and trademark law is what it *is*, not what inside counsel of largr corporations *tell* you it is. They aren't *your* lawyer, you shouldn't rely on them.
Cheers, -- jra