"No material contained in this site may be republished or reposted..."

[toadspittle]

A question about the ownership disclaimers at the bottom of the page.

**By posting on this board you grant the Chicago Reader, Inc., and its successors and assigns a nonexclusive irrevocable right to re-use your posting in any manner it or they see fit without notice or compensation to you. **

Fair enough. Chicago Reader wants to be able to keep the board up indefinitely or use posts in future Straight Dope collections or whatever.

No material contained in this site may be republished or reposted without express written consent of the Chicago Reader, Inc., except that message board users retain the right to republish or repost their own work.

To what extent does this apply? Now, obviously there’s fair use–I could, for an article or a book, quote portions of a thread to illustrate a point. But, presumably, I couldn’t publish a “Funniest Message Board Threads!” book that included many, many SDMB threads.

But what if a screenwriter came in and saw some of the stories told in the threads and said, “you know, that would make a funny/touching/etc. movie,” and used the thread subject matter as the basis for a screenplay? Does Chicago Reader own a piece of that? Do the original posters?

[DCTrekkie]

I’ve wondered about that before. Does it mean that you can republish messages if you get the permission of the original poster, or does it only apply to your own personal posts.

[Gfactor]

By posting on this board you grant the Chicago Reader, Inc., and its successors and assigns a nonexclusive irrevocable right to re-use your posting in any manner it or they see fit without notice or compensation to you.

Gives the Reader a limited license to republish your posts.

No material contained in this site may be republished or reposted without express written consent of the Chicago Reader, Inc., except that message board users retain the right to republish or repost their own work.

Non-user generated content may not be republished. Posters own their own posts, so they can republish them, and license others to do so.

@toadspittle

To what extent does this apply? Now, obviously there’s fair use–I could, for an article or a book, quote portions of a thread to illustrate a point. But, presumably, I couldn’t publish a “Funniest Message Board Threads!” book that included many, many SDMB threads.

To do that, you’d need the permission of every poster whose posts you copied.

But what if a screenwriter came in and saw some of the stories told in the threads and said, “you know, that would make a funny/touching/etc. movie,” and used the thread subject matter as the basis for a screenplay? Does Chicago Reader own a piece of that? Do the original posters?

This is actually a complicated issue. First, you can’t copyright facts, so if the guy just copied basic factual stories, he’d probably be ok. Second, there’s the idea/expression distinction. Expressions are copyrighted, the ideas behind them are not. The Idea-Expression Dichotomy in Copyright Law When you are talking about a fictional story, the analysis gets complicated,
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It would really depend a lot on a lot of details that we don’t have.