Who owns copyright on forum posts?

Hi All,

Thanks for this nice forum. It has been very helpful to me. Without it, I don't think I would have had much luck picking out a firmware for my drive. There are too many options on the web and none of differences were ever defined.

Anyway, I'm a bit troubled by the copyright statement at the bottom of these pages. It says:
By stating this, are you saying that all the posts here are owned by either cdfreaks.com or Jelsoft enterprises? If not, where is this declared?

I think slashdot's policy is pretty decent:

The Form software is Copyright Jelsoft, as are any default layout components.

The page as presented, is Copyright to the forum ownership/administration.

Your own posts?
Unless you are implied to have signed over copyright, I'd assume they are copyright to you, but with redistribution rights given to the forum - that same argument has been mulled over on newsgroup postings... theoretically, you have copyright, but it's of little value having volunteered the content into the public domain.

At least in the US, there is an implicit copyright on whatever you do. It's a relatively new law which is why Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain because they forgot to claim copyright on it. In the case of newsgroups, I agree that the content is out in "the public" but it is not "public domain" as far as I can see. If it was public domain, then I could do anything I want with it including treating it as my own.

I think you could look at books for a similar situation. These are in "the public" as in anyone can read them at a library but are not public domain. I can't take substantial parts or entire books from the best seller lists and incorporate it as my own. I'd be in lawsuits until I was 90 if I tried that.

In the case of google's newsgroup interface, that's actually what I'm concerned about. Google has a rather nasty clause in the license that says they can do whatever they want with your posted material. So to google (using their interface), your posts are for all intents and purposes in the public domain but for everyone else it is murky. I think it's fine that google has redistribution rights since I'm posting in newsgroups and thus I want people to read it. But for them to be able to do whatever they want with everyone's content is disturbing.

For normal text, this is probably not an issue. However, let's say I post code on here. If cdfreaks had a license like google, they could do whatever they want with the code. Even if I put an explicit license, theirs would trump my own wouldn't it?

This isn't a charge leveled against cdfreaks by any means. But think about the scenario where someone posts the code to a really nice utility. So nice in fact that some manufacturer wishes it could distribute it as a proprietary product. Well they conjure up some legalese about DMCA/National Security (you wouldn't believe the contexts NS is thrown in), and sue the pants off of cdfreaks and take it over. What happens to the content now?

That's why i couldn't ask for my posts to be deleted when i resigned as a mod here, even if they are my intellectual properties.

Deleting your posts would be a large affair especially because you have over 12,000 posts. They would have to go back and delete everything. So what happens when you start a thread? Do they chop off your comments and start with comment #2? What happens when other people quote your posts? Should they remove those too?

I think in an effort to keep their sanity, they would have to have a policy of keeping the history as is. Otherwise, it could turn into a management mess.

Even so, it still doesn't answer what the legal status of the posts are. If we as posters own them, where does cdfreaks stand legally?

In the end, I'm not asking for more or less from cdfreaks in a legal sense. It just seems like they should qualify what the legal status is currently. Otherwise it might be a headache in the future.

Take for instance mp3.com. There were lots and lots of bands on there and all the music was destroyed. If there was a company who wanted to continue with mp3.com rather than destroying it like Vivendi did, could they legally?


I'm interested in this because the Internet is a weird place for legal issues. For instance, copyrighted images. If I visit a site and I download their trademark or copyrighted image (because their webpage displays it), what is my legal standing after I visit the site? Do I, legally, need to clear my cache after every website? Otherwise I could be infringing on copyright could I not? There's no stated timeline or agreement for how long I can use the material.

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Last edited by nec3500question; 08-12-2004 at 02:44. Reason: remove dup