Digital Rights Liability Issue?

[Gord]

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

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

[Freesteyelz]

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

[Awjvail]

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.

[Gord]

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...?

[dismas]

Again, it's not hosted on your server.

note: I am not a lawyer.

[Gord]

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 ...

[Marco van Herwaarden]

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.

[Gord]

I'll report back

[Marco van Herwaarden]

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.

[Freesteyelz]

Originally Posted by Awjvail

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.

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.