Legalities of image linking from forums..

[aaronc]

Here's the scenario..
I help manage a site with a message board forums much like this one. On one particular thread, several members linked to a remote sites images.
The webmaster of the other site is complaining that our site is stealing bandwidth and whatnot.

My question is, how liable are we for what our users do? I'm sure this happens all the time. I could just edit their posts and remove the links but I try not to edit any of my users posts at all.

I would think that this other webmaster would just do something about it on their end. They supposedly have 6 years of internet experience and can't figure out how to block remote image linking?

[jdMorgan]

aaronc,

I'd suggest you update your terms of service to disallow users linking to images that they do not own. If you are lucky, the other webmaster will block the hotlinking. If you are unlucky, he will call his attorney.
Edit the posts and remove the offending images. It is your site, and you do not want to be the one who gets shut down due to DMCA violations.

Jim

[ken_b]

I was just now looking at my logs and the list of my images that have been hot linked by others and posted on message boards.

Legalities aside, I'd feel a lot better about hot linkers if thay would give my site credit for the image in their posts.

Maybe that's too much to ask.

[wingslevel]

The funniest solution to this problem was posted in another thread - some guy wrote some code that replaced the image if the requestor was ebay* (we get a lot of our images hijacked by ebayers) with "free fedex shipping on this order!" - if I had that kind of time on my hands, it would be a ball....

[Scooter24]

If you are unlucky, he will call his attorney.

That's interesting. Can the website owner sue and get financial compensation for the usage of his images?

If that's the case, maybe I should simply remove the anti-leeching code from my site and start sueing people.

[Visit Thailand]

Perhaps you could sue but it would be a nightmare to do, and an expensive one.

Best thing to do is for the forum to remove the images as requested or ask the webmaster who is complaining whether you can download the images onto your own server and then credit the image.

I know it can be a real pain we have had people posting our images in busy forums and even claiming that they were their own!

I suggest the solution above the users will still be happy the webmater will be happy. Problem solved.

[ukgimp]

I suppose this depends how serious the number of veiws are. This happened to me recently and it died down after a day or so once the post got boring/old.

You could do the old htaccess trick:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[ScottM]

A simple fix is to email the site owner with a CC to the host and DNS server owner. (Email ALL involved.)

That usually gets things moving pretty quick.

[carfac]

Hi:

I host a forum (as well as write that little e-bay image thing!).

I ABSOLUTELY forbid any user to hotlink to images on my forums. And there is a fairly easy work around for your users, too.

Have them d/l the image to their hard drive... and save it up to the forum as an attachement. Then they can edit their post and link to the attachement, which is now a local file on your server.

I have not found an easy way to see who is hot linking from my forum.... but if I got a note like that, I would be very apologetic, and edit those images out ASAP.

I have found some of my images (fromanother site) on a lot of other peoples forums. I do not bother sending an e-mail.... I just use the old rewrite rule based on the referer trick, and send them nothing. BTW, it is just a quick edit of that to make the e-bay image thing, so it is not like I do have a ton of free time!

dave

[DrCool]

Looking through my logs I see my images being used at a Melissa Ethridge fan board, a Star Trek board, a Dawson's Creek board, and the list goes on and on.

I have thought about blocking people linking to the images but I do have quite a few people who are linking to the images and giving me credit for them so I don't want to harm them.

The thought has crossed my mind of replacing the image with something that says "Long Live ***** Email me at ***@***.com" (put any unsavory character in place of ***** and the posters email address in).

If I had the forum I would warn the offenders once and then ban them if they continue to link to other peoples images. Also change your terms of service to state this.

[FourDegreez]

If you are under US jurisdiction, you can certainly get into legal trouble over this. A good place to start reading up is here: [chillingeffects.org ]

You can technically be fined thousands of dollars per violation. ...Not that it happens often, but better to be safe than sorry.

You can protect yourself from lawsuit if you follow the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. This means registering an agent to receive notices of claimed infringement with the US Copyright Office, displaying a notice to this effect on your site, and promptly removing all infringing content as you become aware of it.

[okephoto]

I have a number of sites where people "borrow" the images to use in their signatures or posts on other forums. I figure this is a good opportunity for some free advertising and immediately modify the image used to include my URL. Works well as it generally is a targetted group looking at the posts.