I have run a forum for about the last ten years. This forum started based on a real life niche hobby/sport and grew rather large having had over 10,000 members. The vast majority of posts have been off the niche topic and cover just about everything. There have been many long time members from all walks of life including everything from doctors and Wall Street investment bankers to high school kids. I realized there has been so much good information posted that otherwise would be almost impossible to find on the internet. None of the posts are indexed by search engines as I do not allow it. What I would like to do is start multiple blogs around certain topics (probably using sub-domains) where the blog posts are basically copy/pastes of these forum posts. Is this legal? Do the posters have claims on their posts? Do I need their permission? With many old posts the posters no longer participate on the forum and getting their permission would probably not be possible. This also got me thinking about a seperate question. Would it be legal for someone else do take these posts and do the same thing I am asking? Is there any difference with it being that I own and operate the forum versus some random person coming along and doing the same thing? Thanks for your input.
I'm pretty sure the copyright of forum posts should remain with the posts' authors, unless they agreed to let you use them as you liked when they signed up. What did your ToS say? I would think that there is an implied license that allows you to display their posts in the forum, but whether that license transfers to you being able to post them on your blog or to earn money from them by selling them in a book is debatable. I also think that there is potentially a moral issue: if people posted assuming that their posts would not be indexed by search engines or seen by non-forum members, how will they feel if their comments are moved somewhere that everyone can see. Maybe one of the legal eagles here can comment on whether there are actually legal precedents in this area.
if it's a public forum, the content is technically public domain but should give credit to the original poster on an ethical basis... As stated by Nonny - a lot would depend on your Terms of Service when the user(s) joined your forum and if those terms stipulate anything regarding their postings.
Where do you get this nonsense? The content of public forums is not in the public domain. Please do not post legal advice when you have no clue what you are talking about.
Actually I didn't mean to suggest that the posts would be in the public domain. What I was referring to was what sort of license the poster gives the board owner to use his or her words. When I post on a message board, I am giving the owner of the board a license to use my words as part of that message board. That doesn't necessarily give the message board owner the right to use my words in some other way, like in a book compilation or on a different web site. If a message board owner wants to be able to use the posters' words off the board, it's best that that is made clear in in the ToS.