celebrities images copyright

Hi!
Some celebrity sites have these terms relating this matter:

"All images are used without permission from copyright owners, but are for personal viewing only. Images are copyrighted by their respective owners. If you see any material for which you own the copyright and you object to its use on this site, please inform us and we will remove it."

What do you think?

I had a celebrity site and I removed it from the web in order to not break the copyright relating the images displayed there.

Give me your opinions.

Thanks!

 

From my experience (I've spent most of my webmaster life in the movie field), celebrities will ONLY EVER EVER EVER go after you for posting an image of them if it damages their celebrityhood. Everything else is just PR to them, and they're a species that survives on PR of any kind.

Examples of damaging PR? Posting their head on someone's naked body.

 

I thought so too, but the law is law

 

I basically agree with him. I have a celebrity wallpapers website and had no problem at all. You have problem if you post fake images that's for sure. Of course if they ask just remove their images (not all). But I don't think someone will ever ask for it.

 

Well, the celebrities rarely own the copyright of their photos. The copyright owners are the photographers. And they might go after you if you use their work without their permission and without paying them royalty.

If you rip off a pic from a magazine, then you sure are infringing on the magazine's copyrights.

 

It would be mad for celebrities to piss of fan sites dedicated to them for no reason, and force them to pretty much close (what's the point of a fan site without any pictures of the thing you are supporting?).

toocoolforschool (I love that name!) is right- celebs will only go for things which damage their image.

 

Like said in a previous post, the photographers usually own the rights to the pictures. A note to make however of what to do is use a face of celeb or make it apear as he/she/it is promoting the product your selling. I recall a couple of lawsuits that were filed by many female celebs when their face apeared on websites promoting weight loss pills and such.

 

If a website has images of musicians, celebs, et al, is it up to the website owner to contact all individual copyright owners? Or, can we SNAKE images found on the web? At most images would live on homepage for a week, then no longer used unless needed.

I have a site in development, however, I have been tasked with providing celebrity images that relate to articles. We write and own the articles.

Images enhance the article, so it looks like a full-time job just to get approval from celebs or photographers. Not to mention the cost associated with copyright use.

Here's the site overview:

Website will be supported by Ads, Affiliate programs, etc.
Membership is free, yet required for past archive information
Forum/Chat is featured

I can not give the website address due to development.

Thanks for the response!