Messages

1

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: The famous letter and some questions about liability

« on: January 17, 2009, 10:34:27 PM »

Hi Oscar,

Thank you for the fast reply!

2

Getty Images Letter Forum / Re: The famous letter and some questions about liability

« on: January 16, 2009, 10:55:34 PM »

I would really appreciate any comments! Thank you!

3

Getty Images Letter Forum / The famous letter and some questions about liability

« on: January 16, 2009, 10:53:38 PM »

Hello,

First I would like to thank for this website. As many others I received a letter from the Getty Images and was really shocked before I started digging the Internet for similar cases. I've found a lot of messages here and there but none of them were similar to my case.

I created a non-profit web-portal long time ago (~7 years) containing public blogs, discussion boards and other social-oriented services available to any visitor after a free registration process. To reduce dedicated server expenses I also host few sites owned by other people. These sites are integrated into my portal and benefit from the centralized system of mentioned above social-oriented services. I must emphasize the important points:
 - the portal contains sites owned by a 3rd party
 - the portal gives access to a public discussion board, blogs etc to any visitor passing a free registration process.

Recently I received a letter from a lawyer company representing Getty Images, claiming that they found X images on my portal and asking for ~$40K. They didn't provide URLs but scanned copies of the copyrighted photos. I spent few hours and found almost all images: some of them were uploaded by the visitors to their blogs, others were used on the hosted sites.

My question is whether I can be treated as a online service provider and thus being not liable for any content uploaded by users of my service (keeping in mind that I stated it in portal's ToS and I am willing to remove any copyrighted material upon request)?