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

Posted by Ferdy on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ferdy
Published on 2010-03-17T08:41:21Z Indexed on 2010/03/17 8:51 UTC
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image

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license

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web-development

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?

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