Screenshots of GUI: copyrighted?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Diane Boos reports: <<One thing surprised me. I have taken classes in web
development and graphics. We were told to copy pictures and/or code then
alter it. This was supposed to prevent copyright violation. From what I
learned while doing my research, I don't think it does. The definition of
copyright clearly states that the creator has the right of its use and its
derivatives. Wouldn't a graphic I copied and altered be considered a
derivative?>>

Your professor was wrong, and is dangerously and perhaps irresponsibly
misleading students who don't know any better, and you might want to
delicately point this out to him or her--once you're no longer in a position
where they might get to grade a future paper of yours. (Of course, it's
possible the teacher just meant that this is a good way to learn how to
draw, and simply forget to mention that it's a really bad way to create your
own content.) Not too long ago, a winner of Corel's annual graphic design
competition lost a large and expensive lawsuit when they took someone's
photo (of an Indian in full head-dress) and converted it into a painting in
CorelDraw. Details escape me at this late date, but you could probably find
them in the Publish archives (www.publish.com) going back about 5 years. The
court ruling was quite clear: "copy" someone else's graphics without
permission, even if you make reasonably substantive changes (e.g., from
photo to painting), and you're violating their copyright. I've also seen (at
an STC conference) a presentation on copyright in which the presenter showed
several instances in which someone clearly based their own drawing on
someone else's drawing--to the point that it was questionably how much
original input they provided--and lost in court.

You can certainly be inspired by someone else's design, and do an hommage to
it or use it for satire (e.g., the many parodies of _American Gothic_ that
have been done), but as in all other creative fields, _you_ have to provide
substantial creative input and do most of the hard work yourself. I believe
there's a much clearer guideline for music (Bruce can probably provide
details): it's the standard by which you're allowed to "sample" a certain
number of notes sequentially of another artist's song, and the one that got
George Harrison nailed for (inadvertently) basing "My Sweet Lord" on "He's
So Fine".

There are no clear rules for this, other than that you have to be able to
persuade a judge that you didn't take the lazy way out. Do that, and you can
pretty much steal someone else's work; fail to do it, and they'll take you
to the cleaners in court.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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"Copyrights? We doan need no steenkeen' copyrights!"

 

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