Copying Anonymous Forum Posts

[Admiralrewd]

My understanding from searching through lots of posts on this site and a handful on some others, is that posts made on a forum are the property of the poster, and that the forum owner/administrator is simply given permission to print them through a Terms of Use or similar. But this raises a hypothetical question in my mind that is tangentially related to my website.
Suppose:
a) all, or nearly all the posts on a particular forum are anonymous by the nature of the website. I suppose there is no such thing as truly anonymous on the internet so this may be a tricky issue, but assume that figuring out who made each post is very difficult, and proving it nearly impossible
b) there is no explicit terms or privacy policy on the website, and the site itself doesn't even appear to be copyrighted (unlike, for example, this forum which has a clear copyright stated at the bottom of every page)

my question is, is copying posts from a site like that illegal? Clearly it is unethical, I'm wondering about if there is some sort of generic assumed copyright on a website. And I am only referencing posts/replies, not any of the administrators content or code of the website.

[jdMorgan]

Copyright exists by the act of creation. The poster owns his post, whether the site mentions copyright or not, and whether or not the author is easy to find. The author could indeed be found in most cases, given access to the Web server logs and a subpoena to the ISPs involved.

You might want to take a look at the US Copyright Office site [copyright.gov] for more information, or the equivalent in your country if you're not in the US.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the US implementation of the WIPO treaty, so all signatory countries will likely have laws very similar to the DMCA.

Jim

[tangor]

jdMorgan said it best, but there's a more simple rule of thumb: COPYING...

If it ain't yours don't do it UNLESS you ask and are given permission.

And then spend the rest of your waking days going after all those others who didn't ask and scrapped your content for their websites...

[Admiralrewd]

I meant to ask it as a hypothetical not because I intended on doing it, but because I was worried it would be done to me.

[tangor]

It will be. Bank on it. Knowing that, decide NOW how you will deal with that. Proactive is always better than reactive.

[anallawalla]

All anonymous posts have a real author and depending on your forum's setup you might know their identity or just their email address. This could be used to prove authorship.