I had a car dealer that went out of business about a year ago. I was wondering if I could take the content I wrote for the site and republish it else where.....? Would it pass as an ezine article or something along those lines? I wrapped a portion of the text in " " and did a google search and there were no results....so can I assume this content will have no problem being ok'ed at ezine?
Not legally. Once you sell something to someone it is up to them to use or not use as they see fit. The car dealer owns the content and using it would constitute copyright infringement unless you have something in writing that says different.
Agree. Legally there are few concerns that you have to resolved first. As you mentioned that this content is not available in Google for the exact search, it simply means that this is new content for google so won't make any problem while doing SEO of your website.
You would require prior consent from the owner of the website as all the content legally belongs to him. There shouldn't be any problem from an SEO point of view in terms of duplicate content.
I'm not concerned with any legal ramifications......I wrote the material and as I said the car dealer is long gone!
So you're saying that it doesn't matter if it's illegal or not becuase you won't get caught. All you want to know is whether or not it matters to Google, right? I'd recommend running it thought copyscape.
Im saying I wrote the DARN stuff.....there is no dealer anymore....no website URL to run through copyscape....NADA!
Legally, it makes no difference if you wrote it or stole it from someone else - it's the same exact thing. It's like saying you sold a car to someone who isn't using it anymore, so you took it back without their permission. It's still theft - now if no one reports it, you have nothing to worry about. You have your answer, now do as you please.
It really depends on what type of agreement you had with the car dealership if you sold it to them and gave up all rights to the content you can not legally take it back, if you had a clause in there that you could also use the content for any reason than you are fine. Those kinds of contracts can be very specific and it does not legally matter if the dealership is gone they own it and can use it in the future if they start another business or the bank could own your content or they could have resold it to recoup and pay off other debts or however bankruptcy works if that's what they did, whether they know it or care is another matter. The person suggested copyscape to make sure it was not online somewhere else, which seems like a reasonable thing to do just in case someone else stole it based on your question as this and poor writing are the 2 main things that would keep your article from being accepted.