How to find near circular objects in an image?

In your opinion, would a judge find that posting an image to a web forum without permission was protected by Fair Use?

• The often has users just posting an image, with no commentary at all, and without the permission of the copyright holder. Also, lots of answers in the topic show screen captures or movie posters taken from the internet, again, without permission: And, of course, there are rampant examples outside of the world of Quora. Clearly some posting, such as when commenting on the contents of the image, is Fair Use. But are all postings protected by Fair Use by the nature and purpose of Quora and other web forums? The upload options for photos makes no attempt to verify that the user has permission to post an image and easily enables the uploading of an image directly from a url. Does this make it too easy to post an image without meeting the four tests of ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

• Answer:

  In my opinion, as you asked here, no. A judge would not find that posting am image on a web forum was Fair Use. My blanket answer is based on the fact that Fair Use requires a minimal use test and copying an entire work very, very rarely passes this test. In fact, the rare cases were the entire work has be qualified as Fair Use are because other factors, like the public importance of the works (e.g. the Zapruder film covering the Kennedy assassination) is deemed so high that the minimal use requirement was overshadowed. How do you use anything other than the entire image? Or a very large majority of the image, such that the primary subject is essentially unchanged? A thumbnail perhaps? That seems to be good enough for web searches to be valid. But people have lost some pretty significant lawsuits (or been cautioned by their lawyers to settle...) when full images are used. http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/ Sure, a screen capture is just a single frame of a movie. You have better standing on that argument. Assuming you fit the other rules (which the question does not provide details on). But a photograph. A whole image. I find that doubtful. Another factor that you fail to mention, especially regarding a movie poster: will you even get sued so a judge can make a determination. For marketing material, unless the use was egregious and counter to the marketing effort, almost certainly not. Yes, it is a option the studio retains (and I think you would lose!), but the history of such litigation is nearly non-existent. Frankly, for U.S. and European websites, copyright owners can just create a take down notice and also save themselves the expense of the lawsuit. With a lawsuit, usually everyone loses, just from going through the process.