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<body class='hmmessage'><div dir='ltr'><div>Dear license-discuss,</div><div><br></div><div>software and open source licensing is tightly concerned with copyright law of software.</div><div>Another topic tightly concerned with copyright are images.</div><div>So I was wondering how to handle screenshots of open source software.</div><div>Most licenses do not explicitly cover this subject (i.e. LGPL, BSD).</div><div>Indeed, I searched a lot for this topic but found no satisfactory answer.</div><div><br></div><div>I think, Wikipedia for instance treats screenshots in the meaning of "derived work", which is sometimes covered by OS licenses.</div><div>As a result the screenshot has a remark (when you click on it), that it has the same license as the originating OS program.</div><div><br></div><div>Few countries could cover this by "fair use", but a lot of countries do not know "fair use" in their legal system.</div><div><br></div><div>However, magazines, scientific publications, web pages and books describing OS software often use screenshots,</div><div>without using these explicit licensing remarks.</div><div>(And in my humble opinion writing about open source software is not a bad thing.)</div><div><br></div><div>Companies producing commercial software usually have some condidtions published, under which screenshots are granted to be used (i.e. Microsoft).</div><div>A lawyer would typically give you the advice, to ask the origiginator of a creation for permission.</div><div>However, in the case of OS software, you would probably need the grant of all contributors, what is practically not possible.</div><div><br></div><div>The idea is just to give the users of (maybe even modified) screenshots of OS software some legal certainty.</div><div><br></div><div>As I was not able to find a satisfactory answer, I was wondering how some experts would think about this issue and its current status.</div><div><br></div><div>Best regards</div> </div></body>
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