Ethics question about hot-linked images

[Nutter]

I've got a photography forum, and have started noticing a problem where people post an image by hotlinking to it, get really well written responses to that image, and then remove the image leaving the forum with a good response to a post with no image. And that bothers me a lot that there are members willing to spend a lot of time critiquing an image only to have that image removed so that the critique no longer makes sense.

What I was thinking of as a solution is to write a script that each night goes through the messages looking for those using the [ img ] bbcode tag and if the image linked isn't on my server, download to my server and change the link reference.

Assuming I add this to the TOS, post about it on my forum so the 80 or so members that are already there know, and possibly leave a short note about it on the post page, are there any potential pitfalls that I'm missing? My biggest concern is about copyright issues, although I would think that if the TOS were clear enough then that concern may be lessened.

[LifeinAsia]

My biggest concern is about copyright issues, although I would think that if the TOS were clear enough then that concern may be lessened.

How on earth is posting it in your TOS going to lessen the copyright issue? You're going from hotlinking copyrighted images (with gray copyright issues, although more of a bandwidth theft issue) to knowingly directly hosting copyrighted images (clear copyright violation, unless you have explicit permission from the owner to host it on your site).

A better solution is to provide a link to the site where the image can be viewed.

[Nutter]

These are, presumably at least, their images - not some random images that they found online. But that is a good point that the script wouldn't know. I'm leaning towards just disabling the [ img ] tags, although I'm not sure I like that idea either.

I guess the safest way would be to go through and edit the posts with disappearing images to say "image no longer available" or something like that.

[rogerd]

Having images disappear is a real downer and renders old threads useless. If your site caters to content owned by the poster (e.g., an artist site, not "rate this movie star" or something that would draw lots of third party images), I'd recommend forcing the upload with strong warnings about posting anything that belongs to others.

You might even have a checkbox to acknowledge ownership and to grant permission to display the image. Be sure to have a good DMCA notice on the site, and perhaps a "report problem image" link.

If you find the feature is being abused, you'll have to try something else.

[Nutter]

Thanks to both of y'all. A couple things said were things I hadn't considered - most notably the fact that not every linked image would be owned by the person creating the link. Most of them are, but the risk is just too high in the cases where it wasn't.

So my current thought is much more boring. I'm going to create a bbcode tag that gets replaced with a message that the image isn't available and a little smiley. That will at least look better than an empty space. I, or a mod, will have to do it manually but I think it's a better option.