-

Hello everyone,

I have been collection TV onscreen presentation for around five years now (even before I joined TVF) and I would like to create a website to show all of the stills I have captured. The thing I am unsure about though is how not to break copyright laws as the images will be copyright to the TV channels. What I need to know is if would be legal to make a pres website and if so what legal info I would need to place on it to keep it squeaky clean as most other pres websites have terms online for the user to read.

Thanks in advance,

Jammy

Could anyone at least tell me if this terms page is legal (before I start creating the site) so no copyright police or any company will come to my door to sue me : http://auctiontelly.kk5.org/#/terms/4541505382

Many Thanks,
James

I did visit several websites ( TV Live, TV Forum, TV Ark, TV Whirl) and copied the user licences as I don't know the law on such things. Basically what I am wanting to know is if a user licence like the one's on other websites would make a pres website legal. If the answer is yes then I would obviously re type out the terms in my own words before I launched my site. This was only something I quickly mocked up so I could ask about.

The standard angle taken is to do with Fair Use, as its all for educational and review purposes, but that is a fairly weak angle. If the legal terms truly accounted for anything, then we'd be suing your pants off for copying the terms and conditions off our sites too.

At the end of the day, whatever statement you put on your site counts for little in a legal sense if xyz broadcaster decides to come after you. If a company decides you're infringing their copyright then unless you have the budget to fight them off in a court (and no one with a hobby site does), you'll remove stuff as asked. You may as well just put the standard disclaimers about you being unaffiliated with them and leave it at that as unless you get explicit written permission from all parties involved (music producers, broadcasters etc) it's not a protection for anything. You ultimately still have to take the gamble whether you want to run the site or not.

That said, broadcasters up until now generally haven't come down on hard on sites as long as you use common sense (and avoid Youtube where everything is automated). In other words keep the amounts used small and don't go throwing the entire sequence of frames from their programmes online in high quality. Oh, and when people come emailing with 'hai can I have a full copy of that programme kplz', saying flat out 'No' is generally a good policy!

One option to start a pres site is always to wait until another one is closing down, it would give you a nice starting point rather than ahving to start from scratch.

Course you want to be careful in case the person is just attention seeking and only threatening closure to try and grab more advertising money to fund their hobby, because that would just be annoying.

Oh, I can't imagine anybody would be arrogant enough to do that...

May I thank everyone who has commented on this thread as your information has been great. As for the site, I will look at the information carefully before deciding what to do.

Thanks once again,

James