Can I use other smilies and images taken from the WEB?

:) Hello everybody,
I’m Pasquale, an Italian guy working as an Web Developer in South East UK.
My best skills are HTML and CSS. Yes, :cool: I love creating web pages… But I don’t do only front end, I have also programming skills such as ASP, PHP and Java.

Currently I’m using ASP in most of my projects… In my last project I’m developing an application that uses a very nice rich text editor (open source project) that has a lot of features such as putting smiles and images in the text… My main concerns is that if I enable users to post their own images, is it legal to show in my web site images taken from other web site such as these ones:
http://smileys.smileycentral.com/cat/13/13_1_217.gif

You can't control your users' actions. I think to keep things simple you should only allow smilies that you want. Its not like you would be selling the smileys. I think as long as they aren't hotlinked like the one above then it might be okay. I don't know this is a tough one. There is a project smiley xtra that allows Firefox users to do just this, insert smileys from other sites into their posts. http://www.smileyxtra.co.uk/

If it's just pulled into text off their server as you have done, it's called leeching and those who are leeched, they don't really look upon it favourably. Tripod.com for example introduced (somewhat a long time ago now) measures to stop things like that happening.

As Aerospace said "You cant controll what your users do" but if you try to, you have to be very strict and adement about it. The web is viewed by US law as a publication, as such you can leave the responsibility of censorship to your users and ultimately they become liable for the content. But if you decide to police the users, and someone takes offense to something on your page, you become liable for the content. By you policing the site, you may avoid some small issues comming to you, otherwise any complaints would ultamtley end up on the end user, so this may save you some time, but as I said earlier you have to make sure that NOTHING gets thru. Look into the early web providers in the US, there is a well known case that went to the supreme court regarding this exact sitiuation and the ruling was basically what I just said.