who knows - but it is inherent problem with all fair use legislations I have seen. It does not mean it will ever happen, but there it is.

I actually had two photographs of a D&D session taken down due to a copyright complaint, which surprised me.

Copyright, the black plague of the modern ages.

ya there was a article where sega was taking down anything that showed shining force 3 all of a sudden , even total biscuit was affected and decided to remove all sega games he had reviewed.

Very incompetent since it's nothing but free advertisement for them.

To expand, to my knowledge such is (or should be) technically legal as long as no financial gain is involved.

So, people have been brainwashed with all this copyright bullcrap (piracy is killing the economy!!! P2P is starving the world!!! Omg! Omg!) at the point of asking the "copyright status" of a screenshot?!?

Oh geez....

Unless that was during the 90s (in which case the problem wasn't so much the company but the moron who owned it at the time), that certainly isn't their standard practice.

During the 90s, on the other hand... even mentioning D&D online was tempting a lawsuit (again, due mainly to the bozo in charge).

It strongly depends on a country. In most countries you are free to take and publish screenshots for a review, commentary, article etc. It's either a "fair use" or "quotation rights".

Remember, that in most law systems, takin a screenshot is just like quoting a book fragment. At least in Poland, doctrine (because there are no legal cases...) says a screenshot is a quotation just like a book quote.

In Poland you may use screencaps, quotations, examples, to make your article more attractive, to address your points better, etc etc.


Listen to me. I've got 666 rep.

True, but something that's really pissing me off is say Games Workshop's attitude. I mean you'd expect them to endorse fans to be creative with that universe, you'd expect them to appreciate fan-fiction and stuff (in two official GW stores the vendors even motivated me to introduce non-GW parts or even build models of my own to create a truly unique army) and still GW simply killed one of the most impressive fan-made movies I have ever seen just for the sake of being assholes (some German Warhammer 40k movie, don't remember the title). It just blows my mind.

I never heard more ridiculous thing about copyrights (I assume it's true, not a joke).

Nope, not a joke. I posted them on twitter and the images were removed due to a copyright violation. This was about 6 months ago or so.

I just checked it again and it said "violation", not "complaint". I suppose that means that the host (Lockerz) is free to determine if they think it's a violation without an actual complaint. So technically it could either be the host determining it's a violation or it could be a complaint, it doesn't clarify which it is. Either way, ridiculous.

One question - did you play your own adventure (made by your GM) or was it a campaign or scenario made by WOTC?

If you're going to make money of it then it might be problematic. Depending on how anal the rights holders are.

For videos at least I know that everyone can make a Let's Play on youtube but if you want to monetize it then you need permission from the devs/publishers before youtube will allow it in their monetizing program.

That sounds more like an issue with the host - did they actually say that it was to do with the D&D brand? I can't see WotC complaining (or even caring), and people routinely post pictures of their games all over the place, but the host might have a no-recognizable-IP policy or there might have been something else in the photos that got them pulled (as there are some product makers who pitch a fit if their stuff is even vaguely visible in the background).