I'm looking to make a site like lolcats for a limited niche. The pics I will be hosting will be user submitted. Am I likely to run into issues with copyright? A lot of the pics will be sort of home made, or have unknown copyrights. Some may be modified versions of real pics, like demotivators. Reckon I can just get away with it?
You are allowed to host your own home made images as they are free from copyrights. But for the copyrighted images, I would write a little disclaimer saying you are not responsible for any images hosted and all copyrights are respective of their original authors. And that you take full right to remove any image/s deemed necessary.
A disclaimer isn't goin to protect you from civil action if the copyright owner wants to go that route.