User submitted video content, legal issues? (not copyright)

**salva** · 08-17-2009, 08:30 PM

Hi everybody, I'm new here so first of all I'd like to say I'm glad to have discovered this great forum. Also, sorry if my english is not brilliant, I'm not a native speaker.

I'm working on a project that could fall under the category of this so-called 'youtube clones', a video community with user-generated content. This website is targeted to a very specific public, let's say people who go abroad and stay with a host family. My worries are not related with copyright issues, since the videos will be filtered before being published, what I'm actually wondering is what kind of legal issues I could face (if any), assuming that in those videos will probably appear members of the family (kids, for instance), or people that didn't give the consent to publish the video on the net.

IMO the uploader is responsible for his uploads, and after reading through ToS from YouTube, Vimeo and other similar services, I understand that these sites doesn't take any responsibility for the content published by their users (including comments), furthermore, they explicitly state that aren't able to filter the content.

It's clear to me that I'll have to draw up a thorough ToS with all these issues, but, is there anything that I'm missing? Is there any violation that could lead to anything further than the deletion of the unauthorized videos from the website?

Really appreciate your time,
thank you.

**chrishirst** · 08-19-2009, 08:12 AM

Having a ToS does NOT protect you from being sued if some one wanted to.

You really need to take REAL LEGAL ADVICE rather than the "barrack room lawyer" advice you would get from a forum.

**legallink** · 08-25-2009, 09:44 AM

You have to be careful here, because it sounds like you are doing more and not less than Youtube. If you are filtering what videos go up and what videos don't go up, you are going to have more liability than YouTube does, because you could be seen then as the content publisher. You really should talk with a lawyer about this and how you are going to approach it.