Digital Rights Liability Issue?
 

I met a guy yesterday who just got a bill from Getty images for a picture on his website. It was a BIG invoice.

Made me think about the images and music floating around my two forums. I've noticed that users make up their own videos (scuba diving mostly) and add a soundtrack, then stream it in from Youtube.

So one of my users might be infringing, say, REM's digital rights via youtube.

Who is liable in the eyes of Michael Stipe's lawyer? The user? Youtube? The forum owner?

Discuss ;)

--------------- Added [DATE]1194004976[/DATE] at [TIME]1194004976[/TIME] ---------------

... and what about Google Images and all those avatars?

I can't speak for Michael Stipe's lawyer.

As long as it's not hosted on your server, as is this case, it is Youtube's problem. The copyright holder will most likely contact Youtube and have them take the video down.

Thanks for your opinion guys.

What about images which are stored on another server like photobox / photobucket and then served into my domain using [img] tags...?

Again, it's not hosted on your server.

note: I am not a lawyer.

I'm going to speak to an IP lawyer on Monday afternoon. If you're interested, i'll let you know what he says.

This is a common theme in the VB community and with forum users: it's not hosted on your server ...

... it is however published through my website. In theory, one of my users could rip off a copyrighted image of, say, Nicole Kidman. In fact, he could rip off loads of them, serve them from photobucket into a thread entitled "Nicole Kidman Photos". After a couple of weeks, the googlebot picks up on it and all of a sudden i'm getting a wedge of fresh traffic: people googling "Nicole Kidman Photos" or whatever. Now, I am benefiting from those photos being on my website. They bring traffic. Traffic means, in theory at least, more adsense revenue.

Do you see what I mean. Vbulletin forums still have a touch of the "Internet must be free / free speech for all / wild west" about them. Maybe these days are, in some ways sadly, numbered with new services like picscout coming into play in an increasingly draconian manner. Picscout can recognise a copyrighted image even if it has been resized and cropped. What about all those avatars out there across all those communities. Where did the users get the images. Are you sure they're all legitimate? I'm not. How many forum users have pictures of sports stars, or disney images, for example, as their avatars. How many Homer Simpsons and Finding Nemos???

Call me paranoid ... :D:eek:

Actually i somehow share your worries about avatars, been thinking about that a lot ltely and i am afraid that they could lead to problems like you say.

I'll report back :)

Great!

If you are meeting with a lawyer, you might also ask something i have already on my mind for a long time:
- Adjust our TOS to include an administrative fee for handling spam. So you can sent a bill to the company that is spamming on your board.

Just not sure if you can make that work in a legal way.

Not exactly. Embedding videos, audio and posting images by the [img] tag can be a violation of copyright law. Keep in mind that copyright also protects how a work can be used. Without proper permission or using public domain content you're swimming among the sharks.

As for the avatars, guess what I'll say on that too. ;)

<font color="darkgreen">Usually when copyright content is shown on your site its just a matter of the owner requesting to the webmaster to remove the content. Now if you have allot of it or are always having them request removal then they may take different action.

Bottom line to protect yourself is to have a clause in the TOS of your website when members sign up that states that they are responsible for the content they post. YouTube has this too.

I'm not a lawyer but its what I see most used methods on forum sites.</font>

I believe there is a clause in the TOS by default, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm thinking of trying to swap [img] tags for [url] tags across the site. Has anyone seen a wee hack for this?

<font color="darkgreen">I think you might just have to use a Replacement var to do that.</font>

That will then change the images to (text) links. In that case they'll be legal. :)

There is a downside, however, since all images including legitimate ones will be in text.

I'm fairly sure simply turning off the [img] tag makes it display a URL instead.

Even if it is legal, its hard to imagine they paying any attention to bills sent to them. The safety net of distance and a lack of respect for the law would apply just as much as they would for the spamming in the first place, I should think.

For anyone interested, I spoke formally to lawyers about the images issue on Monday. I suggest not diverting this thread onto how to deal with spammers, btw.

As a result, I'll be making some changes on my site.

If you run a forum, and you want to protect yourself, you need to consider several things, including:
- Actively discourage copyright theft, and get your mods to do likewise;
- Beef up the standard vb ToS to include a statement about you not condoning copyright theft;
- Put a notice on your home page, or one click away, which states that the site content is user generated and that you do not moderate material before it gets posted;
- Make it very easy for anyone to contact you rapidly should they find offensive content, defamatory material, or copyright infringement on your site.
- Don't let people use disney avatars, or any other professional images which are clearly copyrighted. If you allow it to happen a lot, then you're condoning it and you might be held responsible.

If you do all this and a user posts copyrighted material and you don't notice it, then the user will be held responsible. You need to inform your members that they might be in danger in this way. I know it sounds alarmist, but I work in the commercial side of software and we're seeing this kind of thing more and more. Currently it's just from the big photo agencies, but new web crawler applications make it increasingly easy for anyone to -rightfully - protect their intellectual property on the net.

If you want to seek advice yourself, and I would recommend you do, as I found it very reassuring, I spoke to a couple of guys at Pinsent Masons.

Hope this helps. I'm not trying to be alarmist, just careful on behalf of myself and my members.

Good info, Gord. :)


I've been in many discussions such as this one and this argument above may not necessarily hold water. If you (the admin) or a moderator come across a post with an image posted with the [img] tag and do nothing about it, knowing that most things posted are copyrighted, you can be held liable.

What you're doing here, by updating your copyright standards, is really playing the odds. You're betting with the bigger companies but betting against the smaller companies or individual authors. If you make known to the public of your copyright policies then do whatever you can to enforce them.

Something that might be worth watching on this topic: http://www.princefansunited.com/

Yes. Prince, for a long time, has been enforcing his copyrights.