Can you legally take a screenshot of another website?
Published on July 23, 2018
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
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.
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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.
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