Meet the dev team behind Coppermine!

Coppermine is free software and is being released under the GNU GPL license. It is encouraged that you make modifications to its source. We encourage you to share changes you make to Coppermine to enhance its functionality and direct your friends to download Coppermine. More details can be found within the license file distributed along with Coppermine or on our community.

Coppermine is provided "as is" and without any warranty. Any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the authors be liable to any party for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages arising in any way out of the use or misuse of this package.

Very often people encounter content uploaded to a coppermine-driven photo gallery that they disagree with, take offense to or believe infringes on copyrights. We've collected this listing of Frequently Asked Questions to help you determine your best course of action. Please read this page before contacting us with a complaint, as many questions will be answered below.

Coppermine is a free photo gallery software package that webmasters can download and install on their own websites. If you see a copyright as above, it probably means that the webmaster of the site is using our software. This means that no, the site isn't ours - they simply use our products. However, since we too use the software, there is a slight possibility that the site is a Coppermine project site. Before you contact us though, you should look into it more carefully to try and identify the owners of the site. If you can contact the true owners directly, you will save yourself (and us) time.

The first rule in dealing with picture gallery abuse is keeping a level head and being civil. Firing off an email threatening litigation and throwing around insults will only galvanize them against you. Always make the first step a polite notice indicating the nature of your complaint and a polite request for resolution. If this message is ignored, then proceed accordingly. Contact their host, or perhaps have your lawyer send a proper cease and desist letter. Keep in mind though - don't lose your cool. More often than not, the slight is unintended, and can readily be resolved.

The first person you should contact is the administrator of the picture gallery. Register on the gallery, find the administrator and send them an email or personal message on the forum if they have one. If they do not respond to your petition you should contact the host of the gallery, to determine whether or not the gallery is in contravention of the host's acceptable use policy.

The "Powered by Coppermine" tag at the footer of the gallery software does not indicate that we are the host - rather it indicates that we are the group that owns copyrights to the gallery software, much like Microsoft owns the copyright to the code behind Microsoft Word. If you would like to determine the host, you should look at the WHOIS information for the domain name.

The first way is to register on the gallery or web site in question, and try to contact them through the tools provided on the site. If that fails, try examining the whois information for the website. A great tool for checking whois information is www.checkdomain.com.

The first step is to get in touch with the owner of the site. If you can prove that the material is being distributed without permission, contact the host to have them temporarily suspend the offending account.

In short, you can't. You really only have two ways - the first is to ask the member for their contact information, the second is to take the complaint to a court of law, and have a court order issued to collect the information. The reason for this is that in most countries, privacy legislation prevents the website owner from sharing that information with you.

(The textual content of this disclaimer section has been adopted from About Simple Machines Licensing and is being used with permission)