Pulling Content from Forums

What are the legal and ethical issues?

[Musicarl]

Our message boards have generated some great content, and now I'd like to use some of it as articles for a related site. Where possible, I will ask permission from the poster, but many of these posts are over a year old and I'm sure I won't be able to contact the author of many of these posts.

If I can't contact the author, would it be wrong of me to use the post as an article?

[rogerd]

Check your terms of service (if any) to see if they state who owns the content, what rights are reserved, etc.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'd guess in the absence of a specific statement that the copyright belongs to the author of the post. If that's the case, republishing the member's posts would be a problem (if you don't get permission).