Are there generally legal/copyright issues involved in re-posting forum posts elsewhere? For example, under what circumstances (if any) would I be allowed to gather up a bunch of product review posts from let's say the Sitepoint Forum and repost them on a blog? If I just post excerpts? If I don't include the poster's name/login?
I guess you never heard of something called copyscape. They can print out the results & use that against you in court if the forum is owned by a large company.
Well the answer is not definite, depends on the TOS of the specific forum that you planned to leech on. Tip: Instead of copying blindly, why don't you rewrite the post without changing the actual meaning?
Why dont you just ask permission from the site owner first? Just write the site owner a letter and ask permission, what is so hard about that? A lot of times, if you give credit back to the author, and give a back link to the original article, a lot of website owners will say yes. I had a member of my forum copy an article from another site. I closed the thread, contacted the other website and asked permission. An hour later I had a reply, and full written permission to reprint the article as long as the credits stayed in place. the thread was then reopened. It was a whole lot easier to do that then for the other website owner to get mad at me and my members. Just ask permission, its not hard to do.
Anytime something is written, it has an automatic copyright and no copyright notice is required. If you didn't write it, it's not yours, and you need permission to use it.
generally each written post is under the copyright of its respective author. that´s logical. even when i shit on your houses floor, it is still my shit.