Hosting Pictures at another place than your forum is that still breaking the law?

If i have a forum and i stop people from uploading the pictures to my forum. I will only allow them to post links from image providers. Since the images are not located at my server or forum is this still something they can clamp down on? In my normal mind it would not break any law since the file is not even on my sites.

 

Allowing links to what you know to be copyright material could cause you to be considered a contributory infringer. In the U.S. you could simply put a DMCA notice on your site and take down any pictures for which you get a notice.

 

hum very strange that the pictures not even hosting in my blog and they still contributory infringer, should they not turn to the image place? But i see what you mean. It is best to have an abuse email and answer them accordingly. Can i do like youtube and tagged and others and ask for ID, Written letter and so on?

 

The DMCA Safe Harbor

As a website operator the Safe Harbor means you are not responsible for the copyright infringement of others on your site as long as you do not have actual knowledge that the material is infringing, that you are not receiving a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity and that you adhere to the takedown provisions of the act. The safe harbor applies to links posted by others as well as the content they post.

The Takedown Provisions:
1. You must appoint a designated agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement with the U.S. Copyright Office. You can find this form at http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/. Currently, there is a $105.00 filing fee for this form.

2. You must include in your web site Terms of Service the procedure for contacting you with notification of infringement.

The act contains how the notification must be sent to you, what you need to do, how there can be a counter-notification, etc. All of these actions must be set out in your notification proceedure in your TOS.

 

Thats crack me up, all website need to pay 105 usd to US to be safe from being raided by the FBI sounds like a bad mafia movie to me

 

It is not the FBI who is affected here. What your $105 buys you is insurance that you won't be held liable for the copyright violations of others in a law suit brought by the copyright holders.

 

I guess that megaupload did not buy that than? Is this per site?

 

I have not seen the Mega et al law suits yet, and what the government is alledging these guys did. The newspaper stories do not go into real detail, and newspapers often get the details of the story wrong.

 

The reason MegaUpload became such a target was that whilst they did remove *links* to the copyrighted content on their servers, they did not remove that copyrighted content itself (identified by a hash value within MU's system already). Also, due to an insider/leaked emails - the founders and staff of MU were both uploading copyrighted content themselves and sharing it with others, and sharing links to copyrighted content between each other - showing that they knew that copyrighted content was available on their servers - removing any safe harbour protections.

With regards to making your users host the images elsewhere, this would offer you a little extra protection as you would not be directly offering copyrighted material - but you would be far from in the clear. If the copyrighted images are embedded on your forum, that could be considered reproducing a copyrighted work, and you may be asked to even remove links to any copyrighted images (Google has to). Make sure you comply with the DMCA (such as offering an agent, contact details, etc) and then actually remove the content when requested too. Then (hopefully) you would remain under the safe harbour protections.