Bug#487218: games-thumbnails: unclear copyright concerns

[Miriam Ruiz]

--- Friday 20/6/08, Jon Dowland <jon+bts at alcopop.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm sorry for the unpleasantness of this bug report :(
> 
> I don't think you can apply the BSD license to the
> screenshots for all games. I think there is a compelling
> argument that a thumbnailed screenshot is a derivative
> work, and in some cases, the BSD license is not
> appropriate.
> 
> For example:
> 
> /usr/share/games/thumbnails/sauerbraten.png could be a
> "derivative" of sauerbraten in contrib, or
> sauerbraten-data
> in non-free, neither of which are BSD.
> 
> I think the best way forward might be to split the
> games-thumbnails package up into games-thumbnails and
> games-thumbnails-nonfree. Sauerbraten would be an example
> of a screenshot to go into the latter package.
> 
> For stuff in the former, specific licenses per screenshot
> may be necessary (e.g. a screenshot of GPL material is GPL
> rather than BSD)
> 
> What do you think?

I'm not exactly sure of the copyright and licensing issues of screenshots of games in general. I know that in some countries there's something call Fair Use which I'm not really sure I fully understand, but that won't apply to some others. Leaving aside trademark issues that could affect the rights, and just concentrating on license and copyright usage of screenshots of the games, I don't see any problem in allowing modification and redistribution, not sure about the freedom of usage part, anyway.

Could someone out there help clarify those issues, please?

Thanks,
Miry

PS: I'm CCing this bug report both to the Debian Games Team mailing list and to Debian Legal, to see if anyone there can clarify the issue.



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