BigDave - 6:24 am on Jan 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

Your post is absolutely copyrighted by you, but by posting it there is an implicit license granted to the site to continue ditribuint it in the way that the poster could expect at the time that they posted it. This is basically covered by the legal term "estoppel" and also by the "clean hands doctrine". You are not able to hold me responsible for something that you yourself did.

But you, unless it is specified as an additional factor in the TOS, have no right to do anything else with it that is controlled by the copyright. As the owner of webmanster world, you cannot publish a book of great posts on WW without getting additional rights licensed to you by the rights holder.

You also cannot retroactively apply new TOS to old posts.

What Yahoo has done is to specify the license you are granting them in addition to the implied license when you post on their site.