Should we disallow 3rd party screenshots in RCS. (Copyright discussion)
A recent Dev post from Ton Here has warned against posting 3rd party screenshots in the DevTalk Development forums as it is a violation of copyright.
Should be also be cautious of posting 3rd party screen shots in the Right Click Select forum for the same reason.
The implication is that requests for features that are similar in 3rd party apps should only be accompanied by mock ups of how the feature should look IN BLENDER, not in other applications.
Please feel free to discuss.
2 Comments
I am not an expert on copyright law and imagine most people in these forums are not. However, I am in disagreement with Ton. The use of screenshots for the purpose of education and reverse engineering, as far as I know, is permissible in the US with some Caveats. Namely, while you might not be breaking copyright you maybe be in breach of contract of the EULA.
And From what I understand about EU Directive 2009/24/EC you can reverse engineer software as long as you don't actually use a decompiler. Directive 5 paragraph 3 states: The person having a right to use a copy of a computer program shall be entitled, without the authorisation of the rightholder, to observe, study or test the functioning of the program in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the program if he does so while performing any of the acts of loading, displaying, running, transmitting or storing the program which he is entitled to do. Without thoroughly going through the EULAs and what not it would be hard to actually determine if the original poster is breaking contract. I get Ton's desire to protect the Blender way of development but I do not believe any copyrights are violated with screenshots showing examples of features wanted and desired from other software. Now whether the posters are breaching the contract of the EULA is an entirely different issue.
Hell no. This is overkill, someone should advise ton to revert this nonsense.