My understanding from searching through lots of posts on this site and a handful on some others, is that posts made on a forum are the property of the poster, and that the forum owner/administrator is simply given permission to print them through a Terms of Use or similar. But this raises a hypothetical question in my mind that is tangentially related to my website.
Suppose:
a) all, or nearly all the posts on a particular forum are anonymous by the nature of the website. I suppose there is no such thing as truly anonymous on the internet so this may be a tricky issue, but assume that figuring out who made each post is very difficult, and proving it nearly impossible
b) there is no explicit terms or privacy policy on the website, and the site itself doesn't even appear to be copyrighted (unlike, for example, this forum which has a clear copyright stated at the bottom of every page)

my question is, is copying posts from a site like that illegal? Clearly it is unethical, I'm wondering about if there is some sort of generic assumed copyright on a website. And I am only referencing posts/replies, not any of the administrators content or code of the website.