You are visiting a website or working on a web application. You like the website and suddenly feel that it might be a good idea to cover it in your blog. You quickly take a few screenshots and write an article on your blog. Have you done anything wrong? The answer is… May be. You might have broken copyright protection law.
What is Copyright Protection?
Copyright protection is a law that protects work from being copied or reproduced without permission from the owner. That way it encourages people to generate original work. Work includes articles, paintings, artwork and different kinds of tangible content.
What is Fair Use?
Fair use is legally allowed defence against Copyright protection law. Fair Use allows use of copyrighted material without permission from Copyright owner in certain circumstances such as reviews, criticism, news reporting.
There is a quite a lot of ambiguity and it generally depends on a particular case whether using screenshot is copyright infringement or fair use. Here is a suggestion
- Limit use of screenshots. If your article is full of screenshots, chances are that it is going to be considered copyright infringement. If you use a small screenshot in a long article, it might be considered fair use.
