Forum Moderators: rogerd
My name is Jon, and I am one of the owners of a popular angling forum in the UK. Recently we had the two owners of a new competitor forum join our site, and although we accepted them at face value, things went down hill pretty quickly.
Our remit is to be as inclusive as possible, and the hope with these guy's was that a level of cooperation would eventually lead to some cross-forum participation in events, etc. Whereas the norm for our genre has been bitching and backstabbing, we have looked beyond this.
Things culminated in one of these members being banned permanently, and the other has been suspended for a week in order to cool off.
Subsequently, the fellow which has been banned permanently has requested that we remove all of his posts from our site, which accounts for some 128 posts, across around 40 discussions. The problem we have with Nuke Platinum, is that any deletion of accounts has caused database issues previously, as well as problems opening some of the threads concerned, and of course can completely skew some discussions to the point where they make little sense. In which case we are loathed to accede to his request.
From my investigations thus far it seems that much depends on the terms of use, in situ. I would post ours here, however I am not sure if this would be acceptable, although they do appear to confirm that we have claim to an assignation of copyright/ownership.
My two concerns are firstly that our users are not required to click and accept our terms of use upon registration, and so how might this affect the situation (they are displayed in a module on the site)? Secondly, that we have recently registered as a Limited company, in order to manage monies received from advertisers. The former has not been by way of an oversight, rather in appreciation of the relaxed nature of our community. The latter by way of a vehicle for the purpose of handling income to the site, transparently. As first and foremost we are a member driven, with all proceeds going back into forum projects, and with all directors having agreed to take no dividends from the profits.
Any advice in this situation will be very much appreciated, or if any of you guy's can point me in the direction of any resources, or precedents, which may be relevant, I would be most grateful?
Many thanks
Jon
[edited by: JonM at 10:13 pm (utc) on Dec. 17, 2008]
although they do appear to confirm that we have claim to an assignation of copyright/ownership.
I'm not a a lawyer but I'm pretty positive that is not the case at least in the U.S. What you have is a "soft license" to display the content in it's original context as intended by the author granted to you by them agreeing to the terms and it probably could be argued hitting the submit button. The author however retains copyright, if for example you produced a book from all his posts you would be infringing.
On the flip side I read quite a lengthy legal opinion from law professor a while back for the life of me that I cannot find. In any event it was his opinion at least according to U.S. law that even where a person has given away copyright e.g. has placed something into the public domain that technically they still own it because the transfer of a copyright in the U.S. must be done legally such as with a binding contract.
To the best of knowledge no forum has been forced to remove the contents of what someone has posted providing it was their's to post to begin with..
