Guys some advice needed on copyright enforcement on forums. I was contacted today by a marketing manager of a company telling me that some photos uploaded on my site by a member were copyright and was not allowed to share. They asked me to remove the same within 7 days which i have promptly done. My question is that had i received this mail 2 days after, i won't have been on my site for 10 days and probably have landed in a big soup. How can anyone enforce copyrights on content uploaded by members. Although i have it in the "Rules" not to add copyright content, i haven't seen most members care about copyrights when they upload photos. Any idea on how to tackle this? Also on a related subject, who owns the copyright to a post on a forum? I have read most articles say its the original poster. So are posts his responsibility or mine?
All sites with user submitted content have this dilemma, just make sure you have a watertight disclaimer that implies full responsiblity for the poster.
That's right; first of all, have a strict disclaimer. But most importantly, serious webmasters never leave their websites unmonitored for long periods. You should definitely keep track of it from wherever you're going. If it's not possible for you to do that, you'd best get someone to take care of your site and your emails. As you've mentioned yourself, there could be a lot of issues that pop up while you're gone and there's a chance that some of them won't be covered in your disclaimer. If you don't want to trust people with your email you could try email forwarding for the period you will be absent. One more thing, this is not a "copyrighting" forum, it's a "copywriting" forum. This thread belongs in the Legal Issues forum which can be found here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=44 Cheers
oops, sorry, Some mod can move this please Btw anyone can give me some pointers on "disclaimers" for forums. Any good disclaimer that an existing forum has which i can see to make mine(so that i cover most of the points, if i have missed some)