My Funny Picture

New funny picture website - copyright help?!!?

OK, to get some extra money, I was thinking of setting up a website on which people email in funny pictures or videos they make which are then displayed on the website. (To get money I was going to use Google adsense). However, I'm just wondering if there will be any copyright issues with this - if someone sends in an edited image of, for example, Girls Aloud, and I display it, could I be fined or sued for using copyrighted images on my website? In response to the answer from 'JR0 Breezy', I'm pretty sure a lot of people have been fined for using images copy and pasted from google on their sites, I know that internet copyright does exist.

Public Comments

1. if its on the internet, there is no copyright. unless its a legal document, or something of that nature. just browse a few sites like you want to make, and youll see they have plenty of the same images and videos.
2. To say that 'if it's on the internet there is no copyright' is equal to saying, 'if nobody saw it it isn't illegal'. Asinine. Here are a couple of things to look at. According to the US Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. Code) to the authors of "original works of authorship," including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. Titles, names, short phrases, slogans, logos, URL’s are not eligible for copyright protection. Older materials or US government publications are considered to lie in the public domain and may not be subject to copyright restrictions. This material may be used without permission but the original source should still be credited. The absence of a copyright symbol © does not indicate that material is without copyright restrictions. Most nations follow the Berne copyright convention recognizing works created after April 1, 1989 to be protected whether or not a copyright notice is present The fair use doctrine allows certain materials to be used for nonprofit, educational purposes without fees or permission and balances the exclusive protection of copyright law. The 1976 Copyright Act put forth four criteria to determine fair use: purpose and character of the use, nature of the work, amount used and effect of the use on the work’s potential market value. In essence, if you are making a profit, then you need to have the permission of the copyrighted owner of the material. This is the same thing that YouTube goes through when they remove music and video from their site after it was posted, it was a copyright (or they believed it to be) violation. You can try a waiver of some sort, stating that anyone who posts to your site does not knowingly violate cppyright....blah blah blah. Those as a rule are not worth the paper they are written on. Can you be sued? Absoolutely. WILL you be? Probably not, first, the copyrighted owner has to see it on your site, what are the chances? Second, the first thing that will most likely happen is that the copyrighted owner or their attorney will send you a polite letter telling you to remove the material or else.