What is the name of your state? Texas
I started a website last week called "Hot Facebook Girls," it was set up like a blog and anyone could register and upload stuff. Each post was basically just a girl's name and a bunch of pictures of her. In the disclaimer I stated that you can only upload pictures of either yourself or someone who you have received permission from to upload their pictures, although a lot of users disregarded this and just uploaded pictures of random girls from Myspace/Facebook/Google Images/etc without the girls' knowledge.
Although this wasn't the direction I had originally planned for the site, the fact that people were "stealing" girls' pictures meant that there were a lot more posts which led to a lot more traffic and a lot more advertising revenue. Obviously unethical but since it was making a lot more money I decided I didn't really care and I just turned a blind eye.
After awhile some of the girls found out and complained (there was a "report" feature under each post that basically said we'd immediately take down any post that was reported) and I decided to shut the site down. I asked a friend if it's actually illegal and he said it might be defamation, although I'm not sure it is because they were just using pictures, not saying anything bad/untrue about the girls, and the pictures used were already publicly available by the girls putting them on their Myspace profiles and such.
So I'm wondering, is a site like that actually illegal? If it is, would I as the site owner be responsible for what other people upload to the site? Thanks.What is the name of your state?
I started a website last week called "Hot Facebook Girls," it was set up like a blog and anyone could register and upload stuff. Each post was basically just a girl's name and a bunch of pictures of her. In the disclaimer I stated that you can only upload pictures of either yourself or someone who you have received permission from to upload their pictures, although a lot of users disregarded this and just uploaded pictures of random girls from Myspace/Facebook/Google Images/etc without the girls' knowledge.
Although this wasn't the direction I had originally planned for the site, the fact that people were "stealing" girls' pictures meant that there were a lot more posts which led to a lot more traffic and a lot more advertising revenue. Obviously unethical but since it was making a lot more money I decided I didn't really care and I just turned a blind eye.
After awhile some of the girls found out and complained (there was a "report" feature under each post that basically said we'd immediately take down any post that was reported) and I decided to shut the site down. I asked a friend if it's actually illegal and he said it might be defamation, although I'm not sure it is because they were just using pictures, not saying anything bad/untrue about the girls, and the pictures used were already publicly available by the girls putting them on their Myspace profiles and such.
So I'm wondering, is a site like that actually illegal? If it is, would I as the site owner be responsible for what other people upload to the site? Thanks.What is the name of your state?
