Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: love on October 06, 2014, 01:08:33 pm
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Hi,
sometimes I feel like writing something about Dominion on Facebook. Is it allowed to use original pictures of the cards in a facebook post? I just remember that isotropic worked around this by using different pictures. However, some of the strategy articles on dominionstrategy.com use original pictures of the cards. Is it because dominionstrategy.com has special rights allowing them to use original pictures? Or is just fine to use these pictures? But why was isotropic not to use the pictures?
I think board games first impress with their appearance. Thats why I want to use original pictures in my posts. And I also believe that Dominion is a game you can study your whole life without learning all its secrets. And please dont worry about the content of the posts. Because I know many friends that never googled for strategies for Dominion. I already learned some basic truths about Dominion (Recently, I watched some of shecantsayno videos about teaching jerni), but of course I am not a master. But if I know people who are blind and I have one eye, I can help them to see. Of course not with the quality of a person having two healthy eyes.
What do you think?
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There's no issue with using the official art on dominionstratetegy.com because it falls under fair use.
isotropic was more questionable in that regard; it was an unofficial digital reproduction of the game, thus a lot harder to argue for fair use. Moreover, it was originally created to help with playtesting new cards, so of course placeholder art would have been used to begin with. I think they just left the placeholder art when isotropic was made available for public play.
There's probably no worry about using official art for something small like a personal facebook post.
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This is the first post I've had to move out of Advertisements :)
I think you are fine. We used the art without asking and no one minded. DXV is by all appearances a reasonable person who understands when someone is abusing his hard work and when someone is showing their appreciation for his game.
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Somewhat related: are there larger images of the card art available somewhere? The versions this forum offers as avatars are nice, but they're small, making them hard to use for some purposes. For example, the other day I tried to set Island as my Steam profile pic, but the image is too small for Steam to accept. I could expand it, of course, but that would look kinda ugly, and I'd prefer if there were larger versions of the card art available. There's nothing larger at http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/avatars/Dominion%20Cards/, and the versions on the wiki (eg http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Island) are larger but also contain the card text. Again, I could crop those, but that seems kinda like a hack job.
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Somewhat related: are there larger images of the card art available somewhere? The versions this forum offers as avatars are nice, but they're small, making them hard to use for some purposes. For example, the other day I tried to set Island as my Steam profile pic, but the image is too small for Steam to accept. I could expand it, of course, but that would look kinda ugly, and I'd prefer if there were larger versions of the card art available. There's nothing larger at http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/avatars/Dominion%20Cards/, and the versions on the wiki (eg http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Island) are larger but also contain the card text. Again, I could crop those, but that seems kinda like a hack job.
You can grab the artwork from Dominion Online. Here's Island:
(http://www.playdominion.com/Dominion/CardBuilder/img/illustration/island.jpg)
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Speaking as someone who could write a book titled "Everything I Know About Copyright Law I Read On The Internet" (but won't), fair use is one of the ugliest areas of copyright, but the broad things I think you should know are:
1. Fair use allows for the use of (a portion of) a copyrighted work to be used in the context of commenting on that work. So "Here's some discussion about Dominion cards" should be fine for making use of images of the cards.
2. Generally, the amount you're allowed to use under free use is the amount that you need to make that commentary. So for "Check out how the art for Island, Pirate Ship and Native Village form a triptych!" then you probably only need fairly low-res images of the three together, while "See how the road signs on Crossroads point to game-related locations like Essen!" would need the higher-quality version to see the details.
3. Whether or not you have a valid claim of fair use, your likelihood of being able to use part of the copyrighted work in something on a site like Facebook or YouTube will tend to be correlated with how many people could lay some kind of claim on the work and how many of them are nice people. As pointed out, Donald and Jay are generally pretty cool, and I suspect the card artists are too, so as long as you're not competing with them commercially in some form (like printing off your own copies of the cards) then you should be fine.
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To make things simple--companies and people have a lot more to worry about in terms of copyright than whether or not someone is posting an image of a card on Facebook.
No one is going to sue you if you post a picture of a card on Facebook.
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Thank you very much for your answers :) They helped me a lot.
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To make things simple--companies and people have a lot more to worry about in terms of copyright than whether or not someone is posting an image of a card on Facebook.
No one is going to sue you if you post a picture of a card on Facebook.
They also benefit from someone publicizing the game, so they don't exactly have a motivation for shutting it down.