| who generally owns forum posts?
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disgust
msg:4188995 | 4:24 am on Aug 19, 2010 (gmt 0) |
do the individuals posting retain ownership? if so, does that mean webmasters have no legal recourse to stop scraping?
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httpwebwitch
msg:4189221 | 1:28 pm on Aug 19, 2010 (gmt 0) |
This depends on the legal agreement between you and your users. When a user signs on to your service, is there a checkbox they click to agree to some terms of service? That's where it should be spelled out.
It's typical for a forum to "own" all user-generated content. But beware there is a difference between ownership, copyright, and authorship. Each have their own set of rights and responsibilities. These are usually spelled out in a forum's Terms of Service or legal disclaimers.
Many forums (and other content sharing sites) do not claim ownership of user-generated media; instead they claim a worldwide royalty-free non-exclusive license to use the content. For example, Flickr does not own your photos, but by sending your photos to them you grant them a license to "use" them, ie store them and show them to the Interweb.
For example, WebmasterWorld puts this line in their ToS:
| When a message is placed in any forum system, you are granting a soft license to the site to use it. |
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source [webmasterworld.com]
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disgust
msg:4189376 | 5:13 pm on Aug 19, 2010 (gmt 0) |
i'm assuming that's the case with the standard forums, such as vbulletin and phpbb?
does that mean if a site scrapes hundreds of thousands of our posts there's nothing we can do?
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