How about forum members' posts

is it legal to republish them on web

[blue_eagle]

Is it a legal approach to create web pages based on some forum's members. I wonder if the members' posts are copyrighted to the site and is it a violation to republish some forum's members' posts on different web sites as a content.

Thanks in advance..

[docubio]

Hi Blue Eagle,

I'm a new member myself and just went through the registration process and I gave the user agreement a good read. This particular site says that the author is giving webmasterworld a "soft license" to use their posts. I don't know what a soft licence is exactly, but in the US, the author owns the copyright to anything he writes the instant it is written, unless he is doing work for hire (where you own nothing as you are a paid pen hired by a company or individual to work on it's/his behalf).

Essentially, the authors of these posts are licensing webmasterworld to use the content of the posts, but they are not signing away any of their own rights. It does not give anyone else the right to use the posts, but you could contact individual authors to get their permission or work out a deal for a license to use their postings. It's not a bad idea.

As a related matter, I don't know how far the "soft license" goes on webmasterworld, since it wasn't really specified. I'd like to think that it is a limited license to use posts online only in the webmasterworld web site, but nothing was specified. "Soft license" may actually be an unlimited license for webmasterworld to use posts as it pleases, in ways like a book compilation or other marketed materials. I don't know, though. Does anyone know what exactly the "soft license" is that we are granting to webmasterworld?