The moment some game creator decides to test this will get very interesting. Not good interesting.
Immediately got taken down for copyright infringement. Completely destroyed my desire to ever make a let's play video again.
And it was for a 10+ year old game. It is unfortunate
> As long as you follow some basic rules, we will not object to your use of gameplay footage and/or screenshots captured from games for which Nintendo owns the copyright ("Nintendo Game Content") in the content you create for appropriate video and image sharing sites. To help guide you, we prepared the following guidelines: [...]
The legal gray area definitely still exists for many of the smaller/indie game studios, but this kind of licensing is more common than not today.
Would you say a screen capture of Microsoft Excel is also copyright infringement? If not, what would you say is the legal basis for treating that differently than a video game?
This is one of those areas where principles like “fair use” and “transformative use” don’t really matter, since we’re talking about YouTube de facto policy, not the law. If YouTube decides to honor the claims, then that’s what happens. And YouTube generally errs hard in the direction of rightsholders just to be safe.
Ironically, it was a bible software manual and the screenshots she looked at accidentally had text from a copyrighted bible translation. So she was right that those screenshots had copyright issues, but for the wrong reason.
You might think that's obvious, but you'd be wrong. Software publishers were cracking down on duplicating manuals as a means of trying to curb software piracy.
I can practically guarantee that the "obstinate employee" was given clear direction by their manager on the subject.
Though you do have to keep in mind that depending on when exactly this happened, Kinko's might still have been a collection of hundreds of largely autonomous regional partnerships, each of which could set their own policy.
They were, however, willing to three-hole punch the resulting pages if I removed the binding myself.
Later that day at another, nearby Kinko's, an employee, who happened to be the manager on duty, cut and punched the pages with no questions asked other than "have you seen our selection of binders and report covers?"
This was around 2008, so many years after the corporate consolidation, subsequent acquisition, and rebranding as FedEx Kinko's.
Reading a book is interactive; you imagine the narrative/interpretive voice as you go through it. You might read a phrase one way where someone else might read it differently. Listening to someone read a book removes that difference but still conveys most of the plot.
Aaand Idk if book reads are on YouTube but typically people pay for audio books and some revenue goes to the author
That said, it would be absolutely petty and foolish to pursue any action against it.
Games contain art, music, sound fx, text/story, motion design, and other elements that are copyrighted.
Again, it would be petty and foolish to pursue it.
Yeah it is. However most uses of an Excel screenshot would probably be considered fair use, and Microsoft probably doesn't care for 99% of use cases.
If you look at Wikipedia's Excel article they have more details on the legal rationale behind their use of a screenshot [1]. It looks like Microsoft allows the use of product screenshots in certain cases as well.
I also took a quick look at an Excel textbook I had on my shelf and it specifically stated in the copyright notice that they had permission from Microsoft to publish the screenshots used within.