copyright issues

what can we do?

[edd1]

We allow our users to have their own scrapbooks which are password protected. They can bookmark urls - these bookmarks are public but any information they put in their scrapbooks is private. We encourage them to use any of the unique content on our site and to collect info from sites with appropriate copyright rules (eg wiki type sites) who clearly state use this info freely.

We don't give them a facility to share the info automatically and get them to sign terms and conditions to say they won't use them to collect and store info protected by copyright.

It occurs to me that we could now (because of site authentication) display adsense in these private scrapbooks. However what would happen if a user had copy and pasted copyrighted info into the scrapbook and we were making money off that?

I'm confused whether we're allowed to put adsense in or not? An optimistic guess is that it's similar to google showing ads in gmail? How do they know their ads aren't contextualising to some content in an email someone's recieved but shouldn't have?

If anyone can understand what I'm asking here and has any insight I'd be eternally grateful for suggestions!

[jomaxx]

If the spider can't access the pages then AdSense can't be shown on them. That's my understanding.

In my opinion it's counterproductive to subject people to the maximum number of AdSense blocks on every conceivable page anyway.

[edd1]

yes they can spider using secure authentication. And I'm not talking about maximum blocks. Even one would be fine.

[vincevincevince]

As I understand it, the US position is that if you didn't upload it yourself, then you are reasonably okay so long as you remove content on request. That's the youtube position anyway; and with your content being private I would imagine your position is even stronger. However, I have no knowledge of the law in the US other than previous discussions; so I'd suggest going to read up a lot more first.

[farmboy]

As I understand it, the US position is that if you didn't upload it yourself, then you are reasonably okay so long as you remove content on request.

I think you also need to take an aggressive and active role in informing the people providing content that copyright material is not allowed, require them to agree to terms, etc. It's not enough to passively sit by and think if you didn't upload the material you have no responsibility.

Further, I know of situations where copyrighted material was found on a site, a DMCA submission was made, the information was forwarded to AdSense and AdSense shut down the account.

I've never heard of a situation where a DMCA submission was made, the information was forwarded to AdSense and AdSense contacted the offended site owner to ask who put the content on the site.

Personally I wouldn't want to be in the situation of having my AdSense account shut down and then have to try and get the attention of AdSense to try and plead that I didn't put the content on my site.

FarmBoy