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What if a user uploads a copyrighted photo, either to the photo gallery or as an attachment to a forum post?

Is it true that the site or forum owner is legally liable for anything that a member might upload? Is there a way to protect myself by making the user liable for anything s/he uploads in the user agreement?

Hiya,

I think this all depends on the country that you are in although saying that I know that someone in the UK got sued over here even though they had their site hosted in the US and the same rules didn’t apply. The internet is a very tricky area when it comes to copyright and I would definitely say that if you think this is going to be an issue then you should probably ask for professional advice from a lawyer.

Having said that, my wife and I run a forum / gallery and have massive image galleries on there which people post too. We do have rules on there that people should only upload images that they have the full rights too but we have still had people upload images that weren’t theirs. We have had to tell the people who have complained that as we are running a free site and as such it allows anyone to sign up and post in the forums and galleries then we cannot be held responsible. We then put the two parties together through the PM utility and they sorted it all out between themselves.

All was sorted fairly amicably in the end but I would say that if your site is going to be anything professional based then definitely do seek advice from a lawyer first.

Hope that helps.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Mark, thanks for that!

I just figured that there might be a generic disclaimer embedded in user agreements.

One way around that, I suppose, is to use RSS Flickr streams which can be loaded let’s say on a slidehow onto my site. This way, copyright issues are that of Flickr.
(Having said that, there’s still no easy way of creating rss feeds to sets of photos in Flickr).

I will read up more on this subject and perhaps Creative Commons is a good place to inquire. Will post back.