Looking at the terms of one message board I found this:
Is this enforceable, and if so is there a work around like first posting it somewhere else?
While I can’t speak as to the law, I want to point out one very important, somewhat overlooked principle in American law.
$$$$$
If someone wrongs you, or you wrong someone, and it’s a civil matter, the laws do not mean anything for parties without the money to complain. The real costs to sue or defend from a suit, with competent attorneys, generally start at tens of thousands of dollars and go up from there.
Also, the monetary interest for posts on a random message board is usually near zero, so there is no prospect of a large settlement that would interest attorneys who work on contingency.
So that really just leaves some eccentric millionaire running a message board who decides to sue for the principle of the matter. Not very probable.
There are some sites that clone message boards and google-bomb their site so that often it even shows up ahead of the real site in google searches. That copyright notice is usually intended to give more legal force to take-down notices and the like.
While the posts on the message board aren’t worth much (if anything), monetizing those posts with ads and the like can make it profitable.
I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, so I can’t speak to how effective those notices are for preventing or dealing with stolen and/or cloned content.
The copyright notice also allows the board owners to gather up posts and publish them in a book or in some other form without bothering to ask individual post authors for permission.
I just wanted to point out that you didn’t need to go to another message board to encounter this…
Note the important point that it is a non-exclusive copyright. You can re-use your own posts, you just can’t use anyone else’s (and the board owners can use anyone’s).
From the registration agreement:
Bolding mine.
I’m not a lawyer either, but I seem to recall a general principle in law that the author of a post in this sort of situation also retains rights to his own material. So that all this legalese about copyright means the board or its owners can use the material as they see fit, and prohibits cloning or plagiarizing by others, but someone who writes a lengthy post on some subject can still use his own material, say, in a future book. I think perhaps exclusive copyright ownership by another party may exist if the author has been paid for his work under a contract that makes that stipulation, but not otherwise. Or do I have this all wrong?
EDIT: Posted before I saw the post from Colibri. Thanks. The “non-exclusive” copyright bit makes sense.
FWIW, I republished several of my staff reports in another book. I cleared it with Ed beforehand, but technically that may not have been necessary since I retained non-exclusive copyright.
Most likely the courts would hold that the individual posters retain full copyright, but posting on the forums grants the board owners an exclusive license to use the posts however they want. Cloners are in violation of that exclusivity and are exposed to suit by both the license holder and the copyright holder.
Not aware of any case law on the matter, so take that as a WAG.