Will this count as copyright infringement?

and this is bad advice

Companies that control use of images will NOT always just ask you politely to remove a copyright image from your site. They may send you a huge bill instead. This has become rather common with image copyright violations.

I'd advise you to get permission to use the images or buy rights to use them. You don't say where those images are coming from so check the rights of use on the sites before adding them.

Companies and legal firms that enforce image copyright are used to that trick. If it's your website, you are responsible for what's on it.

I am not a lawyer - but if you use images without permission, you may need one:rolleyes:

kay

I'm a little confused on this issue because Amazon uses these images as part of their Associates program. So are all Amazon affiliates and Amazon themselves infringing copyright too?

If you log into your Amazon Associates account, search for a DVD or Blu Ray that you want to promote then click 'Get Link' there is an option for 'Image Only'. If you select this option it gives you an image of the movie poster that links to the Amazon sales page.

If youngchild92 decided to promote the movies he reviews through Amazon Associates with 'Image Only' links would this still count as copyright infringement?

I'm no lawyer but I imagine Amazon's legal department did their research before encouraging affiliates to use these images.

But I see many websites using movie poster images alongside the review. Are they not infringing copyright? For example this website:

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If you are truly doing movie reviews, using a poster in most cases is fair use. An excellent discussion concerning the problems with this whole concept is at badmovies.org.

Over on Wikipedia, they include movie posters with the following caveat:

They also explicitly state that it is hosted on servers in the USA, since in some countries Fair Use is much more restrictive.

First of all, I'm not a lawyer. This, however, is my understanding of it:

Copyright law allows for certain usage like this and is known as "Fair Use." You can almost certainly use a movie poster when writing a review of the movie (use the AllPoster.com affiliate, as suggested). Copyright infringement can't be claimed if the material is being used to review or critique or as an excerpted example, and so on. It's set up like that specifically to prevent people from claiming copyright infringement when being criticized or reviewed. Otherwise you could quickly sue for copyright infringement and shut down anyone who happened to be critical of anything you've ever written which, obviously, leads to all kinds of problems for consumers and so forth.

Wikipedia has an article on Fair Use that might help. They say, "Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test."

Unbelievable, Wow, Crazy, just a few things that come to mind, here, reading some of the advice in this thread, Wow,
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This is not legal advice....
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If you proceed to follow the advice given either in a desire to either land you in jail or having to hire a "real Lawyer" You will likely and truly find yourself in a very bad and yes Sad situation.

To answer your question "without giving you any advice at all" Yes, it is infringement.

Reviews are one thing, free speech I believe covers most reviews, as long as what you say is based on opinion and not subject to any legal slander or libel considerations. (again this is not legal advice at all)

But using images that belong to someone else, and then "pretending" that someone else uploaded them, (when you really did upload or "borrowed them" ) is completely insane.

Either use Royalty free images, or create your own, or go to the morgue to find them, or find another licensed venue, in other words stay legal, if you have to ask if what your doing is legal then you know deep down in your heart what your suggesting is wrong.

Not judging you at all, in fact, I applaud you for asking a good question, what I take offense to is the replies that suggest that you can get away with copyright infringement by blaming the users of your community,(

I am going to say that is the worst advice I have seen on this forum in all of 2012...

No matter, you know what is right in your heart and because you took the time to ask, and now you have an answer or several answers, you can choose the one you like best.

Me, I find it is always better to do the legal thing, because in the long run what goes around comes around, call it kismet, Karma, or just Providence, playing by the rules will always put you ten steps ahead of anyone else that fails to play by the rules...

Keep this in mind and you cannot fail in marketing, that is one of the most important things that I have learned in 15 years of marketing...

if you are reviewing these movies, you can put copyrighted pictures in your website.

source: copyright.gov

Thank you everyone for your advises and suggestions. And I have decided that I'll not put any movies posters or movie trailers from youtube on that blog. I might use amazon associates images and banners at later time but for now no images! Only plain text reviews and adsense ads! Thanks everyone!

Put the images up.

Nothing will happen.

Relax.

I'm new here.

But as far as I'm aware you can use movie posters, dvd covers and other images / art work that are related to the press release of said film or product without any issue. The problem comes if you try to pass off the photo as your own or modify it in such a way that will infringe on the original items.

Example would be changing Terminator poster to read Furrminator and keeping the terminator image in the background.

youngchild92,

Thank you so much for this post. It's helped me out with what I'm doing also. I'd like to take this question a bit further though. I have a wiki site that is archiving a certain genre of TV and radio history. Right now I do not have ads on the site, but it hasn't gotten big enough to were any pictures have been posted by myself or anyone else. My question is does the rules of the game change if I were to be making money off the site via ads? From what I have found there are ways of getting around copyright legally if there is no money being made... but what about when there is money being made from ad revenue?

I'm pretty sure the radio pictures and sound clips I have found would be alright (almost all of them date back before the 1950's, most from the 30's and 40's), but there are more recent, even ones still in production I'd like to find legal ways of posting pictures, video, and sould clips.

Following is the url of my site if anyone is interested to know. By the way I have decided I'll not put up any images or something like that. Just adsense I suppose.

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Add the images and add a DMCA statement on your site that explains how copyright holders can contact you to take down any copyrighted content.

it is the best that you avoid it. I highly encourage you to get images from istockphotos instead where all the rights are covered.

Deep in your heart, I suspect you know the answer to your question. The fact that you asked it probably tells me that you think what you want to do borders on copyright infringement.

So go ahead and get permission on the use of images. It is the safest way to do business.