: Copyright of screens/movie posters I am writing a (commercial) book about cinema and reviews of movies. My question is about the pictures to illustrate the text. For example I suppose that I can't use the promotional poster

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I've just written a book and that same issue, needing lots of images from films to illustrate it. I'm going to assume that its some kind of 'educational' work in that its purpose is to teach people something, and in that case, according to my publisher it's okay to go ahead and use posters, promotional materials and screengrabs if the films are reasonably old (say 2 or 3 years) because they can claim fair use under a provision for education that all publishers lean on when they sell these types of books.

I was dubious at first but they've been in a business a long time and the reality is that if this wasn't the case then no educational books would ever be published with images because the returns could never justify the probable costs of paying for them.

Hope that helps.