Ask HN: Does reposting someone's photo with additional info fall under Fair Use?
<i>Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice. You should consult an attorney for more definitive answers, especially if you are considering undertaking this as part of a business.</i><p>The short answer is &quot;it depends, but probably not.&quot;<p>There are four tests that are applied by courts to determine if a particular use of a copyrighted work falls under the Fair Use doctrine or not (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copyright.columbia.edu&#x2F;basics&#x2F;fair-use.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copyright.columbia.edu&#x2F;basics&#x2F;fair-use.html</a> for an overview). Under these tests, your scenario has some positive angles, but more negative ones.<p><i>1. Purpose and character of the use.</i> Generally speaking, commercial use of a work is granted less fair use leeway than non-commercial use, for the obvious reason that reproducing someone else&#x27;s work for profit is more damaging to the interests of the creator of the original than reproducing it to comment on it or to use it as a teaching aid. Fair use is intended to protect reviewers, journalists and educators, not people who just grab other people&#x27;s work and then monetize it.<p>There is a wrinkle here, though, in that one type of use that courts have looked favorably upon in the past is the kind they deem &quot;transformative&quot; -- where the person reproducing it goes beyond simple reproduction to add new value or meaning to it. Taking an uncaptioned image and (accurately) cataloging the types of hardware in it could, therefore, potentially be considered a transformative use. But it&#x27;d be on safer ground if the catalog of hardware wasn&#x27;t full of affiliate links.<p><i>2. Nature of the work.</i> This just means that some things are more public than others, and the more public something is, the friendlier it is to claims of fair use if it&#x27;s reproduced. The Louvre puts the <i>Mona Lisa</i> on public display, so it would be hard for them to argue that it&#x27;s unfair for people to take pictures of it. But if you steal my private journal and start distributing copies, you&#x27;d have a hard time claiming fair use as a defense even if you give the copies away for free.<p>So a big question here would be, where are the original images coming from? Are they being posted to public or private fora? Would the people who created them have a reasonable expectation that they could be found and viewed by the general public?<p><i>3. Amount or substantiality.</i> What this means is, the less of a particular work you reproduce, the easier it would be to claim that your reproduction is fair use. This is why book reviews can excerpt a paragraph or two from the book, and movie reviews can include a brief clip -- because doing so enhances the value of their commentary, but nobody is going to think they&#x27;ve seen the movie or read the book (and therefore not pay the original creator) just because they were exposed to those excerpts. The closer the length of the excerpt approaches the total length of the original work, the more likely that is to happen, though, so the ability to claim fair use declines accordingly.<p>In your case, it sounds like you&#x27;d be using the entire image, so you&#x27;d be on tricky ground. You could try to improve your legal position by cropping out everything that isn&#x27;t computer hardware, but images generally aren&#x27;t that big to begin with so you&#x27;d likely still be reproducing most of the original work.<p><i>4. Effect on the market for the original.</i> In other words: if someone interested in the original is exposed to the reproduction, how completely does it satisfy their interest? This is why sharing movies and songs online doesn&#x27;t count as fair use; if I can get a 100% complete and accurate copy of that song from you for free, I have zero need to pay the creator of the original work. And if <i>anyone</i> can get that copy from you, you&#x27;ve completely killed the market for the original.<p>(If this seems like it&#x27;s related to amount or substantiality, it is; the closer you get to reproducing 100% of the original work, the greater the impact on the market for that original work is likely to be.)<p>Here you&#x27;d have the same issues as you have with #3 above, with one caveat -- the source of the images would matter quite a bit. If you&#x27;re reproducing people&#x27;s personal photos, arguably the &quot;market&quot; for those is non-existent to begin with (e.g. nobody&#x27;s ever going to buy them), so you&#x27;d have more of an argument than you would if you, say, grabbed a bunch of images from Shutterstock, removed the watermarks and used those.<p><i>Other things to consider</i><p>1. For some reason, lots of people think that attribution is a big factor in whether something is fair use or not. As you can see above, it really doesn&#x27;t matter that much. If I put a full-length FLAC copy of Drake&#x27;s latest album up on the web as a free download, putting it behind a link that says &quot;this album is by Drake&quot; doesn&#x27;t magically make it fair use. Neither do disclaimers or attestations of pure intent (&quot;I don&#x27;t own the copyright on this, I&#x27;m just sharing it for personal use&quot;, etc.) of the kind you see all over YouTube.<p>2. The above all assumes that you&#x27;re talking about copyrighted images. The vast majority of images <i>are</i> copyrighted, of course, because creators (in the USA, anyway) get copyright on their work simply by the act of creating it. Not <i>all</i> images are copyrighted, though; some are in the public domain, including all works created by the U.S. government, and with those you can do anything you want. And in other cases, creators choose to voluntarily waive some of their copyright rights on a work in order to improve its distribution; an example of this would be works published under Creative Commons licenses, which specifically permit reproduction and some other uses as long as you comply with the terms the license specifies. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;creativecommons.org&#x2F;use-remix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;creativecommons.org&#x2F;use-remix&#x2F;</a> for more info on that.