Forum Moderators: rogerd
e.g lets say we create a moderators only forum and I decide to slag off the competition. Or, lets say I create a password protected section that NO-ONE can access, but for some crazy reason I decide to add hardcore porn, or i copy content from another site, put it in the password section and no-one will ever know.
However, what would the legal standpoint be for such scenarios? if no-one can see it, then is it still an offence?
Lets say I took some articles from webmaster world and published them in the protected area, lets also presume that one of the mods here knew that the articles were there because we went drinking the other night and I confessed. However, no one can prove that the articles are there due to them not being able to get access.
Would i still have to remove the articles? and would i still get in trouble for taking them in the first place?
I assure you this is hypothetical.
i.e. you are not publishing the copyrighted content, you have it for personal use only.
As far as the AdSense - I'm not sure I understand your question - are you saying that the AdSense is being published on the main example.com website ONLY? If the pages on which you display AdSense ads are squeaky clean TOS, then I can't see why there would be a problem.
However, if you put AdSense code on the pages in the example.com/private/ directory, then you will need to worry whether those pages conform to TOS.
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What if that part of the forum was password protected from users, but the spiders could still cahce and read it?
Oops, I just re-read your post, and realized you are talking about using a forum software, where some of your forums are public, and some of your forums are password members only.
i.e. it seems that the forum software would have the same AdSense code being included for all the pages. Hmm. Now I am wondering how MediaBot is supposed to be able to spider the private topic? If it can't log in and spider, then you won't get relevant ads anyway, maybe no ads at all?
Can you put in a hack for those specific forums? So that the AdSense code does not get included?
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If the password protected area is not publically accessible, it is private use. So what sort of offense are you talking about?
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I am reffering to legal issue NOT adsense tos.
cheers
"Private" can vary, too. Obviously, if you have material on a personal hard drive, it's unlikely that anyone will know you have copyrighted material there. If a "private" forum, though, multiple people may have access. If at some point one of these people gets angry with you or the forum, they could report the theft, or even document the abuse prior to reporting it.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating posting copyrighted material on password-protected forums. It just that, most likely the copyright holder would never know about such activity. The question over legality seems almost moot. That said, if you allow or participate in rampant private violations, you could always end up the sap who gets busted.
If the area was strictly admin only, and i was the only admin. However, BOTS were allowed to cache the threads, BUT when a user found such a page on google they obviously couldnt get in to see that page.
Does the fact that google can read it make it public? what if the bots are the ONLY things that can read it?
