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I have posted images from movies in my questions before and always had this question in the back of my mind. I've just came across this OP's answer which included images from the movie The Martian where they did include a fair use claim at the end of their answer:

All screen shots are Copyright (C) 2015 20th Century Fox, used here under the Fair Use provision of U.S. Copyright law.

  • Can this really be a legal countermeasure for such situations?
  • Should we make it an automatic postscript for posts including images from movies where the OP has to fill in the name of the production company and the production year?
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    As to the second point, NO, please do not add such a disclaimer to each and every post with images. That's not necessary at all and would deface a huge amount of our site's content with unnecessary clutter. The question if we can freely add images from movies to our post has already been answered by the question you link to.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Commented Sep 25, 2016 at 16:21
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    @NapoleonWilson Of course I'm not going to act on my own but I'm also curious about the possible legal issues because the former post from our Meta doesn't have a conclusive answer to the question.
    – Montag451
    Commented Sep 25, 2016 at 16:26
  • Well, there are none.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Commented Sep 25, 2016 at 16:26

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US copyright law's Fair Use doesn't require attribution. Nor does it require a disclaimer stating a piece of copyrighted work is being used under Fair Use. The use itself says that, in the context of talking about the work, and the limited scope of the use (a screenshot of a movie, one sixtieth of a second of 120+ minutes).

The disclaimer won't stop any automated takedown tool and it won't stop any aggressive law firm even when they are REQUIRED BY LAW to consider fair use. It has zero value really.

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