What technical/legal responsibilities do I have when hosting images uploaded by others?

Question

You may argue that this question has a legal flavor to it, and that would be correct. Still, it is also a question from a developer's perspective that may help others.

I'm building an image community web site/application. Users can upload images. During upload, users have to select the license (copyrighted, attribution non-commercial or public domain). No matter which license they choose, it is just a piece of data. No matter the license, all users can view all images and also download all images, as you normally do on websites.

My question is: what responsibility do I have as a "platform" to comply with these licenses?

• Do I need to actively prevent certain actions on these images, and into what extend?
• Is displaying the license enough to be legally safe?
• What if one of my users uploads images for which he has no license? Is it enough to just implement a "report this" feature?

Answer 1

• Your question is specific to a country - each country has its own rules.
• Best way to know what to do - get the legal notes from sites like Picasa, Facebook, etc, and read them.
• Usually a legal notice to the users is enough - as long as you have an active mail that can get request from content owners to remove their content from the site if it is there without permission and you response immediately - then I Think you are good to go.

Answer 2

• No, not by any jurisdiction I know of. Make sure people sign a paper (electornically) and agree on only lawfull use (get a lawyer define it).
• No, but it is a good step towards it.
• No, it is not enough. You ALSO must react to those reports.

Depending on country you may have other obligations - like in the US there is a legal process to ask the hoster to take down documents, so you bettre know how to wwork if you fall under US jurisdiction.

In general, the above is a rough guideline, but you SHOULD ask a lawyer for the details.