Just a quick question. A forum owner has posted that they are willing to get litigious if material from their forum is copied. In the light that members of that forum regularly post the same question verbatim in both forums ( including the site owner who has stated their copyright claims) I just wanted to understand what legal grounds we view posts. If indeed there is a legal right to pursue a copyright claim who owns those posts? While I am happy right now to assume anything I post in a public forum is no longer mine to decide what to do with I am less happy with the idea that a forum may wish to own my post. I did have a look at UK law and it seems this sort of legal area is grey and no definitive rules exist and would be worthless to pursue ( the copyright infringement needs to place a financial value on the content in order to evaluate the required payment.) In short , is it even an issue and if it is then should we consider removing the quote formatting and make an explicit statement not to quote from elsewhere?
Copyright of forum post material
by Qcmbr 7 Replies latest forum suggestions
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Phizzy
There was considerable discussion on this on Smiddy's thread entitled :
"With all the information /input thats been volunteered to this site , surely someone could produce a book tapping the wealth of information that is contained from contributors."
What I wonder is, could we who live in the U.K still be sued in the U.S under their law if we infringe it ?
And I am still not clear what would constitute infringement.
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Simon
You own copyright on everything you create or write automatically unless you have agreed to do so for someone else (e.g. typically if you're employed to write something, your employment agreement or contract will stipulate that you assign copyright to the employer).
Writing an online post is very similar except that there is no employment agreement and you are not assigning someone else copyright ownership of your posts. For this site, you grant us rights to store, distribute and reproduce the post (otherwise the forum couldn't function). Some sites stipulate that your contributions become 'creative commons' licensed (i.e. you give up ownership and it becomes common-domain).
Now if someone else were to systematically mass-copy content it would be:
a). Low, shitty and despicable and they would face the wrath of the intertube gods.
b). Violating someone's copyright so could be actionable.I doubt anyone is going to sue anyone over a few online posts or a few quotes. Threatening legal action over miniscule issues is just something Americans like to do but it can be mostly ignored and laughed at.
However, doing it as a concerted effort to steal content or setup a competing site would be something that most site owners would probably take action over.
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kurtbethel
In plain English, don't poach Farkle's posts to compile your next Amazon best seller.
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Amelia Ashton
I quite often wish I had taken note of websites and authors of work I kept in my computer scrapbook when I first started my exit so that I could credit it to them when re-posting it to help others but I wouldn't expect anything I write and post to be "mine" and would actually be quite thrilled and delighted if I did say something that others might use to help some-one in the future!
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Phizzy
Perhaps we could create a section on here like the "Best of" but that actually works and is easy to find, which is done in Q&A format , or Frequently asked Questions format, for new JW visitors to the site. Just the real gem posts on say the main WT errors, without the long debate and posts of lesser quality, but with a link to the original thread.
I know that for me it was just one or two posts that made the WT House-of-Cards teachings collapse, but I had to spend an inordinate time reading on here, many JW's are not readers or researchers so maybe such a section would do the trick for them.
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THE GLADIATOR
Having published various works I had to look very closely at copyright law in regard to quoting and sought advice from a publisher. All writing is automatically copyrighted and the property of the author. An entire work cannot be posted, but a small portion of an entire work can be posted provided the author is credited. Quoting others work is permissible under the defence of ‘fair use.’
Paraphrasing in ones own style is permissible because copyright seeks to protect the authors style not the actual information. Once someone publicly shows their work they cannot use privacy laws to stop others disusing, quoting or commenting on what has been made public. If this were not the case the Watchtower Society would sue everyone who quoted their past failed prophecies. No author would be able to use a single reference, and encyclopaedias would not exist.
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Amelia Ashton
I like memes and imagery as a quick way to make a point.
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