Comparing printing out part of a web page for your own personal use with stealing something is just odd. What if you frame it and turn it round to face the wall when you have guests?
* Generally speaking, putting something onto the internet doesn't entitle you to make reproductions/copies/prints for your personal use, at least in US law and I believe in most European jurisdictions. You can usually see this with photographers who may sell you the rights to your photos in addition to/alongside any physical or digital prints they sell you.
IANAL, but hot damn is this community aggressive to people suggesting they would pay for things.
This reminds me of the copyright note at the bottom of most pages by Ken: https://kenrockwell.com/nikon/index.htm (see the last paragraph of "Help Me Help You" section)
"As this page is copyrighted and formally registered, it is unlawful to make copies, especially in the form of printouts for personal use. If you wish to make a printout for personal use, you are granted one-time permission only if you PayPal me $5.00 per printout or part thereof. Thank you!"
I don't think anyone here is being aggressive, generally people on HN are positive towards paying for things. The argument here isn't "pay for it or don't pay for it", it's "do you actually need to pay for it before printing it for your own consumption".
Until you mentioned it was for your office, the answer was no [1]. You printing something linked online would not violate the four factors determining Fair Use (at least in US law).
That case references reproductions of thumbnail images for search engines and lays out the criteria under which a fair use is judged, and people who are casually reading your comment shouldn't take it as a definitive judgement about legality.
While you're unlikely to be sued for printing off something you don't have the right to make a copy of, you definitely don't have the right to make prints of whatever you find on the internet.
>you definitely don't have the right to make prints of whatever you find on the internet
If you have any references that say that, I'd love to see them. Specifically, I'd like to see anything that says that printing a contents of a publicly accessible website for personal use and not to distribute or sell is a violation of copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but everything I read in the Wikipedia article I linked to says otherwise.
The printed version would be transformative, the image is from a published work, and printing it does not harm the market value of the image. That's why I linked it, because it's substantially the same argument.
> It is not forbidden nor "stealing" to print out for personal use.
Why do you think that? Are you talking about German or US copyright law? Can you cite the law you're thinking of?
"[US] Copyright law does not contain any caveat that allows unauthorized parties to make personal copies of copyrighted products. However, under the doctrine of 'fair use,' individuals may be permitted to make backup copies or archival copies of some materials as long as certain conditions are met. Creating a copy of a copyrighted work for your own ease of use is likely to be considered copyright infringement. But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use."
> So your point is that a screenshot (one frame) of a movie that is copyright protected would be equivalent to reproducing the movie...?
No, my point is that "personal use" is not an exception to copyright law. Where did you read something about equating screenshots of movies with full movies?
You are not allowed to copy entire movies and claim it's legal because it's only for "personal use".
Screenshots are sometimes legal under fair use, mostly as long as you are making a parody or commentary.
Screenshots of movies are sometimes illegal. If you somehow had access to the next Avengers movie, and you leaked a screenshot by posting it to reddit, you might well get sued under copyright law.
Copying images from a web site falls into the same restrictions. It is not automatically legal to reproduce images from a website without permission, even for personal use.
>But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use
That to me sounds like you can print something since web content can disappear at any moment.
You can try to justify it that way, but if you print it and then hang it on your wall, or in your office, to enjoy it as art, like @estsauver wants to do, then you might no longer be in the realm of fair use, you might even be squarely in copyright violation territory.
FWIW, it doesn't need to say so. Maybe that's what you meant? If the site gives no explicit permission, copying is not allowed. There's no requirement to have notice of copyright, no requirement to file for copyright, and no excuse for copying something you don't have the right to copy. Under US & German copyright laws, all works are automatically protected as soon as they're created, with the rights defaulting exclusively to the creator of the work. Unless you have explicit permission (which includes public domain & public license like Creative Commons) or you are copying under fair use, you don't have the right to copy anything legally.
> FWIW, it doesn't need to say so. Maybe that's what you meant? If the site gives no explicit permission, copying is not allowed.
Yeah, the parent commenter was saying you CAN print it for personal use, so me asking "Does it actually say that on the site?", the 'that' is "printing for personal use is okay". Either way I think we're in agreement, just because it's for personal use doesn't automatically make it "fair use".
In the US it would be considered fair use if you print a website's content for personal use. Maybe you'd want to use the laws in the country that produced this content (Germany), in which case I believe it'd fall under freie Benutzung. I'm not an expert in German copyright law, but it seems to me that even in Germany, if you're printing content for personal use and not distributing it or selling it or modifying it, you're in the clear.
> In the US it would be considered fair use if you print a website's content for personal use.
I don't think that's true.
But...
What's interesting about web sites is that visiting them makes a digital copy for personal use. That copying (in your browser and on your monitor) might be covered by the site's EULA, or it might not. If the site's permissions aren't granted explicitly, or they don't differentiate between visiting and printing, the bounds would seem to be gray and a suit against someone printing something from a website they visited might be hard to win.
Everyone in this thread is saying "I think so" or "I don't think so" and no one seems to be able to find any concrete evidence saying it is or is not illegal. I find that to be interesting.
I posted concrete evidence in this thread. I was just being non-aggressive and diplomatic in my wording here.
It's also useful to stay a least a little bit vague, because we're not discussing very specific cases, people are asking general questions and making general statements. Whether or not something will get you into trouble is not something you can answer definitively without actually litigating the issue in court. Fair use has gray areas.
* Edit, just to attempt make this more concrete: "personal use" is not an allowed exception under US copyright law, unless you're using it strictly for backups (fair use). But "Flights to Rome" isn't a US work, the website is authored by Germans, and hosted in Ireland on an AWS server owned by a US corporation but subject to both local and international laws. It's likely that the Berne Convention governs this example. In any case, it's safest to assume you can't copy the material legally.
