Forum Legal Issues

[Onizuka]

Don't know if I'm posting in the wright section. If not, sorry for the trouble that I've caused.

I've got some simple question to the moderator team. I've recently made a Cinema Forum and I'm trying to avoid illegal stuff on it, has movie ripping, downloading, etc.

I would like to know how do you know that for example, a site is illegal and how do you handle a post that talks about illegal sites etc

One of the examples, it's a website with torrents of animes... They say to me that it's legal because of this that is written on the website:

Keeping track of which sites anime is available through BitTorrent can be tricky. The goal of "blabla.com" is to provide a one stop site where you can find links to all unlicensed English anime fansubs available through BitTorrent and also providing information about uploaders and downloaders for each file, which you might not be able to find otherwise.

Please, help me out! I want to make a clean/legal forum! :(

[Wannes]

Wrong forum mate. This is Site and Forum Issues about Neowin and not your site. You'd better post it somewhere else, where I couldn't say because your forum seems to be illegal to me since it allows movie ripping or do I misundersand you?

[Onizuka]

where have you seen my forum? my forum doesn't talk about that. that quote was from a site.

[Wannes]

So if I undestand you right you're saying to me that you want to keep your forum as legal as possible? I think the only way you can do that is giving users no change to make it illegal.

Delete topics and give them warnings/ban if they start about illegal things. Don't delete the discussions but delete the links. You're not illegal if you discuss certain illegal things, you're illegal if you offer links/files that are illegal.

[shihchiun]

If you really want to stay legal you should just prohibit any of this stuff. There's a really fine line between what's legal and what's not, and if you don't know what you're doing you could find yourself in trouble.

[Andrew Lyle Global Moderator]

well if i understand you correctly, you can filter the web URL, and change it into something else.

example... say the site www.saycheese.com was an illegal BT site, and you can filter that url, (like a swear word) and change it into www.google.com or something ;) or what neowin does, is change it into << SPAM >> (for n0-ip addys)

[Veedems Veteran]

It's really a hard line for us to walk, but we like to play it safe. If it seems fishy, we close it until it's proven 100% legal by our own investigations, not the nagging of members. You will lose some members for it, but you will also be saving yourself many problems in the future.