Copyrights

[janmb]

I completely agree Nez, that is is perfectly "safe" to use pirated pictures, but in the end of the day, the rights of the owners isn't what matters. What is far more important is the rules here on milo and what potential harm us users place upon seraph0x as the owner.

I don't care much if people use pirated pictures, we all know perfectly well that happens a lot of the time. As long as logos are not edited out, I suspect the owners in more cases than not will stay quiet and be thankful for the free advertisement rather than make enemies by trying to shut it down. As I pointed out earlier, it's even easier to commit commercial suicide within porn than any other content industry since advertising space is such a hard commodity to come by in the first place.

[les]

there have been several copyright threads



                                  click here

[Nezhul]

What is far more important is the rules here on milo and what potential harm us users place upon seraph0x as the owner.

omg, WHAT potential harm? Do you know what you are talking about? Shocked.

[janmb]

omg, WHAT potential harm? Do you know what you are talking about? Shocked.

Nez, you need to separate common sense and fairness from US legislation, which unfortunately is not as irrelevant as one could hope and like.

You also need to tell apart my personal opinions (which are identical with your own as far as I can tell), vs. what rabid legal regimes can do.

There have been numerous examples of world wide prosecution from US stake holders against website hosts and owners, where they are held an accomplice to their users' copyright infringement. TPB and MegaUploads are prime examples here. Obviously those sites can't be compared to Milovana in any way, BUT the principle is the same: Despite the rules here on Milo places the entire responsibility of users' infringement on the users themselves, you can not take for granted that the owners would not be prosecuted for it as well.

There is a massive difference between our personal opinions of what makes sense and what is fair, vs what US laws and lawyers are capable of - sadly.

So no, you don't need to be shocked that someone (me) acknowledges the potential for the owners of milo being held partially responsible for our actions. Fair? Hell no. Possible? Sadly yes.

Also not claiming this to be likely. On the very contrary, it is virtually no chance of ever happening, I'm merely relating to the fact that it potentially CAN.

[DoxysTurtle]

aha!

I KNEW someone would actually read the rules!!

the place that posts pictures is this forum:
http://www.milovana.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24
in this forum is a list of what photos are acceptable
preferred sites.. and other interesting facts especially if you read more than just one post!

and I was told no one would actually read all those rules..

I believe those were simply suggested sites, not preferred, as I understand it, outside Milovana's agreement for using Kink.com's images (the premade gallery feature) there is no preferred soure.

Also, Fair Use should be delved into more detailed here, since it is very likely that at least some of the creative content made here on milovana easily could qualify to reuse otherwise copyrighted material under the Fair Use clause (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use)

This is probably the most persuasive argument. That webteases could be considered a new creative medium which qualifies under fair use... The other part is, you're giving Milovana the rights to display your creative work (the combination of text and pictures), you aren't stating you own the picture.

[Nezhul]

On the very contrary, it is virtually no chance of ever happening, I'm merely relating to the fact that it potentially CAN.

So? You live in a world where you potentially CAN be sued for anything, even breathing. So? not live at all? Do you know how many things on this site can be a reason for a case? Everything, including the thing that the site background is white and not black. Really. It's not the reason to stick only with crappy free samples.

[janmb]

So? You live in a world where you potentially CAN be sued for anything, even breathing. So? not live at all? Do you know how many things on this site can be a reason for a case? Everything, including the thing that the site background is white and not black. Really. It's not the reason to stick only with crappy free samples.

I agree.

[Sexytimes 5]

While I agree in principle with the idea that we should feel free to use any pictures we can get our hands on to make teases because it will only serve as a free promo for their owners, it simply isn’t very smart to do so. If this "go ahead and use them because they don't care and don't have time to come after you" logic were true, all nude photography pay sites in the world would soon be out of business. However, because they vigorously and actively defend their copyrighted materials and go after copyright infringement they stay profitable.

The Fair use clause has zero play in relation to the use of copyrighted images on this site. We cannot claim any protection or right to use anyone’s copyrighted images under that clause for our purposes. The bottom line is that if any owners discover their material being used and don’t feel like they are getting some bang for their buck they will make the site remove them and the site will do so immediately.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you are selling them for profit or redistributing them for free. Anyone who gets members area pictures got them with the standard “for personal use only” agreement. The owners will be upset if you distribute their pictures for free because they lose money since people don’t have to pay to get them anymore. The only reason why they release promo sets in the first place is so people will be drawn to their site and pay for more and higher quality.

This sites owner will undoubtedly tell us that we absolutely cannot and shouldn’t use any pictures that aren’t owned by us, we don't have written permission to use, or aren't released as promotional by their copyright holders. The pesky legal things called copyrights are very important overall to this site as well. Look down towards the bottom of this very page. I see something that reads: Copyright 2006-2012 Milovana.com. Interesting huh?

[seraph0x]

But again, Milovana is not in US. US laws don't directly apply to it.

Milovana is based in San Francisco, California, United States. So we follow the laws of the US, of California as well as international copyright law. As an aside, the US government claims that US copyright law applies to any website worldwide if it is accessible to users in the US.

On the subject of copyright: If you would like to post a webtease and you are unsure about copyright, we strongly recommend you use the gallery feature. Otherwise if you upload copyrighted images, please be aware that you may need written permission from the copyright owner unless your work is covered under fair use (which depends on it being non-profit, educational, add significant creative value, etc.) Please do your own research or consult a lawyer if in doubt.

We are actively working to make gallery images available for our upcoming interactive tease system Eos. There is a lot of interest by websites to join our gallery program. We have several new partnerships in the pipeline. The bottleneck right now is that it takes time to setup the necessary importers, but after Eos is released you can expect the selection of galleries to expand dramatically.

Copyright law is still evolving and adapting to the web. Currently our lawyers believe that there are strong protections in the law for sites like ours. We work actively to minimize copyright infringement on Milovana, although with only a single DMCA takedown notice related to webteases in six years, we believe we're already fairly successful at it. Even adjusted for traffic, YouTube, Flickr etc. all receive orders of magnitude more notices of infringement than we do, not to mention Megaupload and the-like who receive hundreds of times more than that even. Despite the low volume of complaints, we have very efficient processes in place and respond very quickly to these inquiries. We also employ technical measures to prevent repeat infringement and we have sanctions for repeat infringers. Even so, we closely monitor the situation and if copyright infringement ever becomes a problem or if the legal environment changes significantly, we may decide to disallow uploads entirely and rely on galleries.

As always, IANAL TINLA.

[janmb]

Thanks for chiming in seraph.

As I read that, what you are essentially saying, and what corresponds perfectly with the user content part of the rules for milovana as well, is that it is up to each and every user to make up their own mind regarding the legality of their content. Which makes perfect sense as a natural extension of the way the rules places the responsibility on the user as well - just like it ought to be everywhere.

As long as the site has a good way to handle take-down requests, the site and its owners should be pretty safe from responsibility regardless of what the users do. Pretty much all the sites who get into accomplice-suits on behalf of their users' actions do so due to not heeding requests from copyright owners. Which I personally don't think a site should be responsible for doing anyway, but that's beside the point. It's a very efficient way to keep out of harms way for sure.

The galleries and further cooperation with other sites sounds great - the only concern there is for there to be enough new material being made available over time so we don't end up with a static set after a few weeks or months. If that happens it will become useless pretty fast even if the volume is fairly large to begin with. More or less constant renewal is paramount for that idea to work.

On the upside, the partner sites get a lot of advertisement space here on milo - which I assume is their prime reason for being interested in the first place.

[Nezhul]

Hmm. I thought the host is somwhere in Europe, like neterlands or something?

[janmb]

Hmm. I thought the host is somwhere in Europe, like neterlands or something?

Doesn't matter much if the company is registered in the US...

[Nezhul]

Oh well, forget about it then. Still I think the chances of someone actually making a fuss out of it are slim (if not nonexistent), especially if we are talking about hudge sites like met-art.

[janmb]

Oh well, forget about it then. Still I think the chances of someone actually making a fuss out of it are slim (if not nonexistent), especially if we are talking about hudge sites like met-art.

No one is disputing that fact. What CAN be debated is the relevancy of that statement.

Whether or not we should abide by any given law or rule isn't solely determined by the chance of getting punished for breaking it.

And no, I'm not high-horsing at all here, I'm as much of an immoral son of a bitch as you get, I'm just pointing out...