I don't expect you to risk any liability for this site. But I also am pretty sure you're in the clear on this one. Whoever complained must be a real ass, to put it nicely.
Thumbnails are considered a 'de minimis' use, and therefore are a fair use of copyrighted material (this is how Google Images is able to function legally). Additionally, linking to copyrighted material is not a violation of any of the copyright holder's rights. Actually embedding the video on your site can be considered an infringement, but from your post it sounds like you were not doing that. If I understand correctly, the issue is that a copyrighted video comes up in a Flickr-generated listing of pictures and videos tagged 'Lansing.' If that is the case, the complaining author is seriously misinformed about their rights, as linking to copyrighted material is not infringement on your part or Flickr's part. To find that it is infringement would be akin to telling people they cannot publish a map to a location - for that is essentially what a link is. If the video is posted on a website, anyone can link to it. As long as you are not embedding the video on the site (so that the video could be viewed here, without requiring the viewer to visit the original site), and whatever appears on the site simply takes viewers to the original video, you're in the clear. Furthermore, if you are simply embedding a Flickr stream that automatically generates results based on tags, the copyright holder in the video should take up the issue with Flickr. If the copyright holder uploaded or linked the video to Flickr themselves and tagged it, through Flickr's terms of use they have consented to its appearance in search engines and streams, and cannot claim any sort of infringement.
This isn't meant to be legal advice in any way, just a general statement of the law...I can't speak on the details, as I'm not sure your exact situation. If you want detailed advice I'd contact an attorney locally.
I've added the thumbnails back in and also added some from SmugMug. The author of the video doesn't have any content being linked to right now anyways.
Jared, I see you removed the Flickr cells, again. As Wood explained, whoever complained as no ground to stand on. These are thumbnails. This is not to mention that one can set their pictures to appear in small sizes only on Flickr. We can't let one disgruntled and uninformed Flickr member ruin this for everyone else. Folks (including myself) enjoy coming here daily going through to find the newest shots of Lansing. Many of mine appear there when I post to Flickr. If anything, I consider it as a free advertising to get people to view my Flickr page. That's why everyone posts on Flickr to begin with, right?
Do not be bullied by someone without a square-inch of legal ground to stand on.
@Jared I was wondering a few things regarding the site. Is it possible to sticky items here? I was thinking it may help to sticky some threads, at least the General Lansing & East Lansing development threads and either this thread or a new "site news" or similarly themed thread. An "introduce yourself" thread should probably be stickied also, along with any other suggestions. I don't remember if it's been asked before, but I was also wondering if there's any way to quote with this software?
I was thinking of trying to update the project pages again also, I forget how to do it though. I'm not sure how they should be written either, I'm really thinking of them largely as a place to aggregate all the links and information regarding any given project.
Yeah, we can sticky discussion threads. There isn't a good way to quote a comment, but you can use BBCode with [quote][/quote] to show quoted text, but it's not like other forum software that auto-links to the comment, etc.
Yeah, the project pages get out of date pretty quickly. It may make more sense to use the first comment of a project thread as the "project page", as that first comment can be edit & updated. I think if I make people moderators then they would be able to edit the comment even if they weren't the original author.
And I've realized I've only started one of the recent project threads, The Outfield. I redid that initial post to make it more of a landing page for the project. I may attempt to do the same with the Sparrow page that I started.
Comments
This isn't meant to be legal advice in any way, just a general statement of the law...I can't speak on the details, as I'm not sure your exact situation. If you want detailed advice I'd contact an attorney locally.
Do not be bullied by someone without a square-inch of legal ground to stand on.
I was thinking of trying to update the project pages again also, I forget how to do it though. I'm not sure how they should be written either, I'm really thinking of them largely as a place to aggregate all the links and information regarding any given project.
Yeah, the project pages get out of date pretty quickly. It may make more sense to use the first comment of a project thread as the "project page", as that first comment can be edit & updated. I think if I make people moderators then they would be able to edit the comment even if they weren't the original author.