I want to set up a web site which shows information from a bunch of different forums on one page. From each forum there will be subjects of new posts and beginning of its content when you point a cursor to it. Then user can click on the subject and open the website. So it means I am not going to publish 100% of forums content, just subjects as links to original forum plus a little bit of posts content to give reader an idea what this post is about. There are some news sites that use similar approach to aggregate news from different sites/blogs. It will be also profitable for the forums that I am going to use because they will have additional traffic for free. I am wondering about legal side of this idea. Thanks, Michael
If you are just aggregating topics, with the links of those topics going to the original source, it should be fine. That's ultimately what Google is doing when you do a web search.
I'm not so sure it would be so simple. The contents of a forum are likely to be copyright of the forum owner and you can't go around and copy their content without their permission. While forum owners may be happy to allow Google to visit their site they do have the option to tell the Google bot (or other well-known search bot) not to index any or all of their site. Also, I'm sure most forum owners see their search-engine rankings and google parsing of their forum as a positive thing but they might not take too kindly to someone else taking their content, no matter how small a portion. It is likely to be even less popular if you make money from your site, or your site includes contents from competitors or less salubrious locations. To be on the safe side I think you'd probably need the forum owners permission.
There is something called RSS which allows you to do this nicely. Just check the feed for this forum and implement it into your site. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/external.php?type=RSS2 As Shawn says, as long as it links back to original source you should be fine. Also if you check topix.com you'll see that basically every bit of their content is rss feeds from other news sources and do exactly what you are wanting to do, but instead of going to the forum where the content is originally from it goes to the news source, LA Times, NY Times, etc etc