Every image without a watermark is fair game.

That is something I've wondered about too.

i actually attended a lecture on this topic a while ago, but the lawyer giving it was so full of himself and repetitive, I couldn't help but zone out. For my own purposes i just decided to only use original pics. But that isn't possible here. So I have no clue.

you have to note the law of your country and I know that's very strict in the EU

Samara is 100 percent correct. Make sure you know the law, in particular if you have your own website.

Every image without a watermark is fair game.

I still think if a photographer disagreed with his/her image being used here we would have to take it down.

@Samara said:

you have to note the law of your country and I know that's very strict in the EU

That's bad news, Samara. I don't know how to find that out :( The thing is, if i have an image with a German text, it's probably copyrighted by let's say Warner Brothers Germany.

Does anybody else have an idea how I could/should proceed here?

Thank you all in advance and many greetings,

Heiko

for germany there is a good site https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ usually every image that you did not make yourself and is not under creative commons ( which can be restricted, too) will be violate a copyright if you don't have the permisson of the owner to use it

@heiko22475 said:

@Samara said:

you have to note the law of your country and I know that's very strict in the EU

That's bad news, Samara. I don't know how to find that out :( The thing is, if i have an image with a German text, it's probably copyrighted by let's say Warner Brothers Germany.

Does anybody else have an idea how I could/should proceed here?

Thank you all in advance and many greetings,

Heiko

You can be quite certain that almost all content on TMDB would have to go if anyone would actually sue (not just the images but also copy+pasta overviews). The API section here for example has multiple reports of app developers having had their app rejected from itunes/google play due to including actual images of movies/shows in the preview screenshots and the same applies to devs for TVDB, fanart.tv, trakt etc. As with any copyrighted material you'll have to create a basis for it if you're not going to license it: fair use (reviews) or for example promotional context (links to amazon, official site, etc). The easiest thing you can do for some tiny protection is to include a disclaimer that the content, images, etc. are properties of their respective studios and that you claim no rights to them.

Thank you very much for your quick answers!

I'm going to do as follows:

For my private website: Embedding any Image and sharable youtube video in iframes. With transform:scale I can resize the image. EU/German laws say this is allowed (but doublecheck if you gonna do that!). I'm gonna use some of your data, with the attribution (reference to the movie db). A drawback is, if I take a description for example, it could be copied from somebody who could possibly sue me.

Finally I'm gonna help maintaining content of YOUR great website :))

Great work, guys!!!!!

Cheers, Heiko

Embedding any Image and sharable youtube video in iframes. With transform:scale I can resize the image.

Actually this is not the intended use for the API. It's expected that you do some caching on your end (for a website downloading the images) to help with traffic and all. A small site is obviously not that impactful but imagine sites like letterboxd or trakt just hotlinking (to gauge some numbers for that see https://apiblog.trakt.tv/trakt-api-images-56b43c356427#.veelxw1bp - it's even more for tmdb with all the mediacenters it serves). (Just fyi)

Recieved a large bill from German Copyright holder for the following Actress-Headshot, as it was on our Website via API. Please delete it:
https://www.themoviedb.org/person/48369-barbara-wussow?language=de-DE

That image was even against our image rules (no full body images) so not a problem to delete.

It would be fine if photos e.g. from Wikimedia could be used. There are a lot of "free" photos (CC BY-SA), but there is no proper way to fulfill the license requirements, e.g. naming of the photographer. Without this license requirements it's not possible to use this pics.