Can you legally take a screenshot of another website?
So, the question of legality came to mind one night as I was taking a screenshot of Amazon to better illustrate my point for one of my blog posts. I started wondering if this was potentially in violation of copyright laws.
I'm no lawyer so I decided to do a little research online just to be on the safe side. From what I've gathered, posting a screenshot of a public site seems to fall under Fair Use.
For those not familiar with the term Fair Use, it is the U.S. legal doctrine that permits the use of copyright protected works by others under certain circumstances.
I'm not here to bore you to tears with too much legal jargon but basically under Section 107 of the Copyright Act, there are 4 guidelines that you can follow to determine if your activities qualify as Fair Use.
- The purpose and character of the use: Generally, reproduction for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research is not copyright infringement. I underlined some of the highlights of that first guideline as I believe, in my opinion, that covers us bloggers for the most part.
- The nature of the copyrighted work: This one gets a little tricky but my interpretation is factual materials like technical articles are more likely to fall under fair use than copying something that is more on the creative side. Think movies, short films, songs, or novels.
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole: Simply put, the more you reproduce from the original source, the more likely you're out of bounds and not protected by fair use. For example, if you were to reproduce one page from a 200 page book, you're probably fine. But if you begin to use much larger portions of that copyrighted work, then you begin to put yourself at risk.
- The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work: Finally, with the last guideline, courts will decide if the unlicensed use of a copyright owned material has harmed the original owner's present and/or future market value and to what extent.
Let me reiterate, I believe we are just fine when it comes to using screenshots of a public website. But like I mentioned before, I am not a lawyer and from what I've read online, these things can really be case by case, so if you want to do further research on this topic, I've provided some helpful links below.
https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html
https://copyright.columbia.edu/basics/fair-use.html
Recent Comments
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So basically when I can't find a royalty free photo, I can take a screen shot of one from a website and use it on my site?
Heidi, I'd be careful about doing that honestly. What I'm talking about is taking a screenshot of Amazon or eBay to use on my blog post. I'm not sure if you're referring to screenshotting a copyright protected stock photo? I definitely would NOT do that.
No not a paid stock photo. Just something like Kyle showed in one of his training videos where he took a screenshot of something on a page and used it on his blog.
If you're referring to Level 2, lesson 6 of the OEC, Making Use of Visuals, Kyle was taking screenshots of images from Wikimedia Commons. Those are royalty-free, creative commons photos. Where he was taking a screenshot of raspberries, right?
Yeah, those photos are public domain...you can download them freely or screenshot them like Kyle was doing.
"screenshots of a public website"
"SCREENSHOTS": an image of the data displayed on the screen of a computer or mobile device.
Are you really copying anything? I certainly don't think so!
You didn't copy any "text". You didn't copy any picture. All you did was pulled out your camera and took a picture of the store, place, or thing. Heck, if that's a violation of copyright, then no one should take a picture of anything with their camera then?
The key in the clause stated is: "reproduction for purposes". Since you did not "reproduce" any thing, in fact, you created new, you took a picture of it. That's not "reproducing". That's "creating new". And, since you're "creating new", and did not "reproduce" anything, how can that be considered "reproduction" and violating copyrights?
So, no, I don't think it violate anything. That's my answer, and I'm sticking to it!
Well, technically when you take a screenshot you are in fact "reproducing". You're not creating something new in that instance.
When you take a screenshot, you're literally copying the image that's on your computer screen. To take it one step further, taking a screenshot of another website is taking a pic of their intellectual property. I think the key here is a "public website" like Amazon should be fine.
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Hi Michael,
I am writing a lesson for one of my sites and I started taking screenshots of where to look for it inside the Amazon associates account. The purpose of the article I'm writing is a "lesson." I really hope it's ok to grab a screenshot from inside Amazon associates account.
Thank you for this post.