Copyright laws and the internet

[mupcollector1]

I was talking with Microsoft on the phone today (only people I could get in touch with) and they save saving images is illegal, same as everything else but it all depends on the companies thoughts on fair personal use. So I had to delete a bunch of pictures that I saved and oh my gosh, All the walls of my apartment of print outs of screenshots from my favorite shows and films and only fan's would relate to how I felt. I was literly crying for about an hour. It just makes me think about businesses and how a lot of them look at their customers just another wallet full of cash. But as an artist and fan of art, it's so much more than that. These fictional characters created by artists that got bought by companies, the fans truely care about these characters on a very deep personal level as if they were friends with them. That's the beauty of media art to me. But it's quite sad that there's becoming less and less artists in the world today and more and more reality TV.

 

[Hubert]

But I have to say that deleting pictures that you saved is a bit unnecessary...it's not like they are going to arrest you or something for having them. It's pretty unlikely that they would ever even know you have the pictures saved. Pretty much every person online saves pictures, and you never, ever hear of people being sued for having a copyrighted picture on their computer...

I also have to note that the majority of the pictures you probably saved were previously saved by someone else and put online, and even online no one cared that those pictures were up.

 

[mupcollector1]

Perhaps it's mostly guilt of hurting companies perhaps. Because I love pop culture so much that if something so small is damage to them, then well...that's just me I suppose.

 

[D'Snowth]

Look at it this way: saving a picture from the internet onto your computer isn't too different than taping or DVRing a TV show.

 

[newsmanfan]

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Um...deleting all that was wholly unnecessary. You having a pic of some screenshot of a show you like is hardly an offense you're going to be arrested for...or that financially hurts the owners of the show copyrights! If you screened it onto a tee-shirt and tried to sell it, that's different. But owning an image as a fan? What the hey's wrong with that? EVERY fan of EVERY show/movie/comicbook/etc would be jailed by now if anyone bothered to go after people just collecting images for their own enjoyment!

Heck, most of the screenshots I have stored are ones I've personally taken, from dvds which I've personally BOUGHT...so the owners DO make some money...and I don't use the images for anything but my own amusement. Mupcollector, you're not hurting anyone!
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[Slackbot]

From the mid-90s to the mid-oughties I managed a mailing list for Disney Afternoon based fanfic and fan art, with screen grabs, sound grabs, and occasional other goodies thrown in. As this was early in the age of the Public Internet and at that time Disney was known for being evil to fan publications, I was very careful about what I put out there, knowing how unwise it would be to annoy The Mouse. In general, here are the rules I followed for this and all of my later fan activities:

1) Don't harm the original source's merchandisability. Meaning, don't post anything that could compete with the original source. No videos of things that are legally available on DVD or elsewhere. No ripping albums and posting them for download. I have done things that use clips and songs and screengrabs, for example music videos, but those do not compete with the original episodes or songs, and are this transformative in nature. (If the owner of the song or footage complained I would take them down, however. I'm no fool. I've also done episode transcripts, but that was after consulting with the company and getting word that that would not annoy their legal staff.)
2) Don't tarnish the image of the original source. Meaning, keep things reasonably close to the spirit of the original show. In the case of the mailing list I was running, which had subscribers at Disney.com, no activity that I would be embarassed to explain to the parents of a kid in the show's original target audience. (Which is not to say I'm a prude. Mercy no! But I'm very careful where I make naughtiness available. You don't put copies of Penthouse on the bottom of the magazine rack.)
3) Don't make money off of it. This goes back to point one. If people are making illegal merchandise, the owner of the intellectual property gets nothing, and it competes with legal merchandise that they do get a cut of. So, I don't sell fan art, I don't make T-shirts, I don't sell DVDs of my fan videos.

In theory, fan sites, fan fiction, screengrabs used in icons, fan art, all of it's illegal because it uses another's IP without perission. (Others would say it's all legal because it's transformative. This is where the lawyers earn their paychecks.) However, you also have to take enforceability and the effect of such actions into account. No company, not even Microsoft or Disney, can see what every user has saved on his or her hard drive. If it's just some screengrabs, downloaded copies of fan art, etc., and it's just for your personal use, who cares? Who is it harming? It's not like you are downloading torrents of ripped DVDs or CDs rather than paying for legal copies. It would do them no good to go after such users, and in fact it would damage their image, make them look like ogres who attack their fans. As fans of ReBoot and The Simpsons know, that can result in severe backlash in the form of bad publicity.

Also, keep in mind that fan activity, whether it's writing fanfic, drawing fan art, making a site, or just saving and printing some pictures you like to look at, benefits them. It keeps their IP in front of consumers' eyes. It's free publicity. It makes for happy fans, who buy things and spread the word. So, many companies have a policy of benign neglect. Let the fans do their thing and generate interest, and only step in when they step into the danger zone, as described above.