I'm at -3 and you're at 9. I feel deeply ashamed on behalf of Hacker News for your aggressive ignorance of copyright law. Hacker News, you're usually better than this.

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A screenshot is a document like a photograph or essay or article; it's not a physical object. Cars and iPhones are not copyrighted. Software and software UIs and documents mechanically reproducing them are.

Tell me, do you think the copyright on the text in a software UI just magically goes away because it's a screenshot? How about the icons? Or the fonts? Or any images? What if the software is displaying a photograph or book? Did you just discover a way to make anything under the sun public domain? (An amazing discovery!)

Tell me, do you and all your upvoters think you know better than Wikimedia Commons when it writes (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots) :

> Screenshots are subject to the copyright of the displayed work, may it be a video, television program, or a computer program.

Do you think you know better than the librarian who wrote http://web.archive.org/web/20080216021841/http://www.jiscleg... ? Or how about http://www.chillingeffects.org/copyright/faq.cgi#QID809 or http://lifehacker.com/193343/ask-the-law-geek--is-publishing... or any of a dozen links you could have found in seconds googling 'copyright screenshot'? Notice the only question is whether fair use will defend you when you infringe on copyright by making screenshots and not whether screenshots are copyrighted at all, because they are copyrighted.

Do you, in fact, have the slightest argument besides a specious analogy?

I apologize if my question came off as presumptuous and/or snarky. My question was genuine. I assumed from the up-votes that my question's underlying basis was indeed correct.

Clearly, taking a photograph of an art work does not automatically create a copyright free version of the art. Nor does scanning a book.

Just to clarify: A photograph wherein a copyrighted image appears but is not the focus of the image might likely classify as fair use, I assume?

Modders, please upvote parent and downmod my previous comment.

> Just to clarify: A photograph wherein a copyrighted image appears but is not the focus of the image might likely classify as fair use, I assume?

It might, but there you are getting into vagaries of fair use. Dialogue, music, trademarked goods - all these things can creep into a video or a photograph and taint it with derivativeness. (Is there a trademarked Coca-Cola prominent in your photograph? You may be in trouble. Is there a TV in the corner playing _The Simpsons_? Lessig gives an example where copyright-clearing a few seconds of that TV crippled a documentary.)

For example, a sculpture is copyrighted and photographs thereof derivatives & copyrighted, except in Germany which has specially granted the photographer protection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama

Is there a nifty Apple-designed good coughiPhonecough in the picture in question? Now you have to worry about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design_right

Did you know buildings are copyrighted? http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/documents/ip_photography.htm#1.6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_th...

Your point is well-taken, but I think that Symbolics is now defunct? Granted, the copyrights don't vanish, but who knows where they transferred to, if anywhere.

To http://www.symbolics-dks.com/