Purely factual question surrounding SDMB rules (I am not passing judgment, and urge my fellow board members to show the same courtesy ). But who does our content on these boards technically belong to, legally? I seem to recall a while back someone joked that it belongs to the Chicago Reader et al. But we later found out that perhaps that was no joke.
Anyway things have changed. And as I said, it was a while ago IAE.
The reason why I ask is, I am sure sometimes someone here may want to cross post, to another message board. And you know copying and pasting is easier than typing.
On some other message boards it’s a nonissue. But here I wasn’t sure. (Again, no debates in ATMB.)
This is the relevant section of the registration agreement:
So basically, if you wrote the post, you are free to cross post it elsewhere. If you didn’t write it, you can’t copy/paste it elsewhere unless you get written permission first.
By posting on this board you grant STM and its successors and assigns a nonexclusive irrevocable right to reuse your posting in any manner it or they see fit without notice or compensation to you.
They go on to say other things, but I think that’s pretty clear: each person owns the posts they have written, but give the company a right to reproduce/display it.
I could only imagine that a US court would maintain that the poster owns the copyright (for any posts that are eligible for copyright protection), but that the registration agreement counts as a license for the Straight Dope to reprint anything posted here.
So you can repost your own writings and you can repost the writings of others with their permission. I don’t think that the “Republication of material appearing on the SDMB without express written permission” bit would suffice as a exclusive license that would prohibit others from allowing you to repost their writing. But the Dope could find you in violation of their rules and kick you off the board.
If you took a bunch of posts from the board and tried to publish them, then you might run into trouble. Could be seen as trademark dilution, but that would be for a court to decide.
I don’t see anything explicitly allowing that in the registration agreement, so I would say no, the company has no such right, though they may be able to allow a subsidiary or affiliate to do so. I would defer to a contract attorney on the matter, though.
As an example of why this is relevant, some of the Straight Dope books included samples copied from the SDMB. The owners of the Straight Dope at the time (I believe that was the Chicago Reader) were able to do that, because of that part of the registration agreement: They didn’t have to track down every person who posted to those threads and ask them all individually. And the current owners could do something similar, if they chose.
Several years back there was a period where a few websites that basically copied the whole SDMB and claimed it as their own content. Posters must have reported 5 or 10 of them. Do the mods know if any action was taken, like a cease and desist or something similar? I understand companies have to defend trademarks seriously or risk losing them.
). But who does our content on these boards technically belong to, legally? I seem to recall a while back someone joked that it belongs to the Chicago Reader et al. But we later found out that perhaps that was no joke.