I run an SNS for education called PikiFriends. Junior and senior high school students and teachers can use our safe network for various educative purposes. We’re just starting out and user numbers are low right now, but I’m getting very concerned about copyright issues because many students upload images from other sources, and/or use those images as their own user icons. For example, adding images of their favorite celebrities on their profile page. You know, the thing that happens on Facebook all the time.

Since there seem to be so many grey areas concerning copyright infringement when it comes to SNS use, and since we’re solely for secondary education, it makes me wonder where we stand. What should I do as the founder, wait until someone complains before taking down images (but only secondary schools are allowed to join, we’re highly protected from the public, so there’s almost no chance anyone will know anyway)? I don’t want to proactively go through everything and delete the copyrighted images, and besides, in many cases how do we know if it’s illegally posted or not?

One thing I do know, it’s a great opportunity to teach kids about these issues. As a rule, we should teach students to adhere to the laws, and to learn about creative commons licensing.

I’d appreciate any feedback!

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New comment on your post #1010 “”Wow, you do look like Mariah Carey!””

Comment:
Wow, did you write this article yourself or pull it from somewhere else, its great!
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Yes, I wrote this article myself, and thank you for the compliment : )

If it’s up to the point that people can’t use someone else’s picture of a celebrity to have some fun with it, I don’t know what will happen. I guess everyone who owns a copyright should sue on a mass basis. Copyright infringement laws need to be looked at more closely and modified.

From a quick glance at that site, it seems like X17 operates along the lines of a gossip blog (which is what Perez’s site is). In the first factor of fair use alone, I’d say using an image for the doppelganger game (for lack of a better term) is quite different from Perez’s use (Perez is actually a competitor of X17 in some ways).