Sharing game screenshots and videos is 100% legal?

[mjens]

I'm thinking about sharing my collection of screenshots and videos from lots of games I've finished but I'm not 100% sure is it fine for developers? You know, there might be an idea in the marketing dept. that I'm sharing things I shouldn't or something?

 

What do you think? I'd like to tag all the pictures and videos (currently 15 547 files, 25GB's) on LD.org so if you'll type "chair" or "water drips fx" in the search box you'll get all the content that is tagged with these words. Might be useful to see how, let's say, rocks were made in Skyrim.

[Thrik]

I've never heard of this ever being any kind of legal issue. I'd imagine that if it were tested in court, they'd have to be considered either application screenshots (ie: like taking a screenshot of Microsoft Word) or media excerpts (ie: like taking a still from a movie). I think in both cases it'd be considered fair use, because the purpose wouldn't be commercial and the excerpt of the total work is so small.

[-HP-]

I am almost 100% sure it's not illegal, specially since you wont be making any money off of that. Publishers and developers really don't care, in fact it's even a good thing cos it's free publicity.

 

(Unless Nintendo games, afaik Nintendo specifically banned and introduced copyright laws for media sharing stuff like that, so if you have any Nintendo games, you might get contacted by their legal dept to bring the media down)

 

PS. Great idea btw, I hope it comes to fruition.

[Vilham]

Fair use laws.Can depend on your country but most have them.

[dkm]

I'd love to see that happen! Both for refs and memories sake

[mjens]

Yep, I found 3 free online galleries, each with tagging option and will test them soon. It's: ResourceSpace, piwigo and cpg. RS looks most promising right now.

 

Here's the list of games that are mostly 100% screenshoted, some of the titles are made by my friends from work, I hope to see more in the collection

Aliens_Colonial_Marines

Batman_Arkham_City

Battlefield_Bad_Company_2

Bioshock_Infinite

Black_Mesa

Castle_Crashers

Chivarity

COD_BO

COD_BO2

COD_MW3

Crysis_3

Dark_Messiah_of_Might_and_Magic

Deadlight

Dear_Esther

Deus_Ex_HR

Dishonored

Fallout_3

Hard_Reset

Left_4_Dead_2

Legend_of_Grimrock

Mafia_2

Medal_of_Honor

Medal_of_Honor_Warfighter

Metro_LL

Rage

Singularity

Skyrim

Wolfenstein_2

 

Example:

[selmitto]

This is going to be a great resource for reference, for sure

[El Moroes]

Yup, good idea !

[FMPONE]

I would also submit them to Dead End Thrills, it's a great site that's worth supporting in addition to your own projects

[-HP-]

I would also submit them to Dead End Thrills, it's a great site that's worth supporting in addition to your own projects

 

different purposes tho.

[mjens]

Yep, Dead End Thrills guy is making art of games, I'm making a more technical refererence database.

 

1,2,3, check:

http://level-design.org/referencedb/picture.php?/19/category/1

 

How it looks, how it works, all fine?

 

The one minus is that you need to go to "Photo sizes > Original" to open the largest size. I'll try to fix it later, maybe I'll just leave M and XL sizes

Edited August 20, 2013 by seir

[-HP-]

How hard would it be to make the thumbnails bigger? I really like medim to large thumbnails, even if it means having to scroll through long pages.
Also, atm you have 15 pics per page, could you increase that to like 50 or whatever? I hate having to keep clicking "next page" "next page" "next page" "next page" on and on, I prefer to load everything at once even if it means slightly bigger loading times.

[mjens]

Thumbs are now bigger but still not massive. Maybe I'll add an option to show bigger thumbnail after hoovering if it's still to small? I've set photos per page to 50. It would be awesome to have infinite scrolling option but I guess Piwigo doesn't support that...

[-HP-]

Ah, much much better! My only nit-pick, and you already mentioned this, when you open a screenshot you actually only open a "medium" size version of that screenshot, to actually access the screenshot you need to click a hiden button called "Download this file" at the top. I noticed you can set the screenshots to XXL Huge, and it remembers that option but the image clips with the page. 

 

Have you thought about just using Flickr? Pro accounts allow you terabytes of data.

[mjens]

Flickr is less indie I'll think how to solve the "download this file" issue