Important: Use of Assets in Previews on Envato Marketplaces

doru said

outerspice said
It seems ridiculous to replace all of my movie stills in the Movie review section with irrelevant stock photos of other types of things, because that could potentially confuse my customers, hurting both them and me (and Envato). It’s a lose-lose-lose situation.

the alternatives is that the owners of those movie stills may close envato marketplace for copyright theft.

and more lose situation than this.

There has to be a better way. I won’t accept “under no circumstances can you link to a still of a movie on your own server for an item preview.”

Please don’t suggest that I contact each movie studio and obtain a license to use each photo in my demo. The cost of that in terms of time and money would completely eclipse the gross revenue of the theme itself. (In order to demonstrate all of the review types in my theme correctly, I have written over 240 dummy posts, each with a featured image.)

How can I provide my potential customers with a proper demo? Can anyone recommend where I can get stock photographs of movie stills? Am I missing an obvious resource? I would love to do this the right way – I have absolutely no interest in breaking any copyright laws.

Any suggestions are welcome!

outerspice said
There has to be a better way. I won’t accept “under no circumstances can you link to a still of a movie on your own server for an item preview.”

If you don’t respect envato terms they will soft disable/delete the item, and they can also ban you from the marketplaces if you don’t understand this simple thing: you can’t use content that is not yours/don’t have authorization to use.

doru said

outerspice said
There has to be a better way. I won’t accept “under no circumstances can you link to a still of a movie on your own server for an item preview.”

If you don’t respect envato terms they will soft disable/delete the item, and they can also ban you from the marketplaces if you don’t understand this simple thing: you can’t use content that is not yours/don’t have authorization to use.

That’s exactly why I’m asking for recommendations to do this the right way. If I didn’t respect Envato’s terms I wouldn’t have even bothered posting anything here. It seems like you are more interested in playing police than actually helping me solve my problem.

outerspice said
That’s exactly why I’m asking for recommendations to do this the right way. If I didn’t respect Envato’s terms I wouldn’t have even bothered posting anything here. It seems like you are more interested in playing police than actually helping me solve my problem.

I’m not a lawyer so don’t take this for granted:
you should say “bye bye” to movie stills. At least from the blockbuster/commercial movies. Instead, maybe you can try and find some indie films, published under CC licence? That way it might be allowed to use stills. Or at least it would be much easier to contact authors, as they should be more reachable than Stevie Spielberg or Woody Allen

I don’t know if that works for you…

urbazon said

outerspice said
That’s exactly why I’m asking for recommendations to do this the right way. If I didn’t respect Envato’s terms I wouldn’t have even bothered posting anything here. It seems like you are more interested in playing police than actually helping me solve my problem.

I’m not a lawyer so don’t take this for granted:
you should say “bye bye” to movie stills. At least from the blockbuster/commercial movies. Instead, maybe you can try and find some indie films, published under CC licence? That way it might be allowed to use stills. Or at least it would be much easier to contact authors, as they should be more reachable than Stevie Spielberg or Woody Allen

I don’t know if that works for you…

That helps, and it’s a pretty good idea. Thanks.

outerspice said
It seems like you are more interested in playing police than actually helping me solve my problem.

Not at all. I’m not the one who decide what rules this marketplace has and I’m not the one who apply them. I’m just an author like you.

Since you said you don’t accept “no movie still” as an answer I just told you what could happens if you continue to use them. Now, those things could happen or not, since from the moment this thread was created, a few days later, a theme that has movie stills in the previews that are hosted on envato servers, had been accepted by the reviewer with no apparent problem. So probably that author found a way to license movie stills after all.

As a solution, try purchasing some stock photos from photodune, put them through some nice filters in photoshop and you can get something that may resemble a movie still.

What about Fair Use? Since I’m using the stills just to demonstrate a theme (educate customers), would the stills fall under Fair Use? The following excerpt about Fair Use of movie stills was taken from here: http://www.reelclassics.com/Buy/licensing.htm

Section 107, “Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use,” says in part:

The fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

-the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

-the nature of the copyrighted work;

-the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

-the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In other words, for certain non-commercial, nonprofit educational purposes, a small portion of a film (for example, a still or clip) can be reproduced without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder, but you should still give credit to and acknowledge the copyright holder as the source of the material. (For example, under an image or clip from BAMBI (1942): “©The Walt Disney Company”.) For more information, check out the Helpful Licensing Links below.

I notice sites like Stereogum, Kotaku, and Cnet frequently use the same type of images I want to use in my demo. So, my questions are:

1) Do these sites have to get licenses to use each and every image in their blog posts?

2) If not, is that because of Fair Use, or a different reason?

3) Whatever the reason, wouldn’t my demo blog fall into the same category? Isn’t it just a blog with info/review articles similar to a Stereogum or Kotaku?

4) Wouldn’t links to showcase sites for items fall into the same category as live demos? If not, how is that any different? Will authors need to remove their item showcases now, since those showcases could potentially contain copyrighted images?

I appreciate any feedback or information anyone knowledgeable on the subject can provide.

Guys, can I use the watermarked picture from Photodune to my flyer and put some color effects on it? (+ I give link in discription). Please fast anwser!

Wait a minute. Are we talking about the link to the Live Demo hosted on our own server, or the Theme Preview that we upload to ThemeForest?

outerspice said
Wait a minute. Are we talking about the link to the Live Demo hosted on our own server, or the Theme Preview that we upload to ThemeForest?

both