Digital Rights Liability Issue?

[Gord]

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.