TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
I have read on another forum that it is not permissable to copy and post material that has been posted on other websites, even if it is freely available and not explicitely prohibited. I have contacted the webmaster, and he informed me that this is a gray area, and different forums (fori?) have different standards and ways of handling this. This forum will delete any post that is protested by the copyright holder. To prevent any problems, I have gone back over my posts for approximately five months (more on some places I post clips to frequently) and deleted them, leaving only the link. Exceptions are a few things such as email newsletters which I do not have a link to (and btw, such copy-and-paste is usually the way I learned about these newsletters in the first place, so you are actually getting free advertising). This probably constitutes checking and editing a couple hundred or so posts. I feel this is a reasonable effort. Anything older is probably a 404 link anyway, and since I generally post news items, they are likely obsolete. Much earlier and I was not posting links yet, just the article, making deleting them hash of some subsequent comments by others. Also, some of these quoted my quotes, and I have no control at all over these. I figure this is enough time that any copyright holder would have protested by now...if you notice any undeleted material in this time frame, please let me know and I will delete it. Thank you, and I apologize. From now on I will only post the links.

This might sound like a silly question but what about one's own personal postings from other sites? I have 2 ,+ the one that I own, generational boards that I post to with their own seperate audiences. Rather than type the same message 3 times I simply copy and post the message to all 3 boards. Can I as the author have the copyright rights?

Originally Posted by Wyn76

This might sound like a silly question but what about one's own personal postings from other sites? I have 2 ,+ the one that I own, generational boards that I post to with their own seperate audiences. Rather than type the same message 3 times I simply copy and post the message to all 3 boards. Can I as the author have the copyright rights?

My guess is that as long as you're not under contract and getting paid by a publisher for your posts, you have the right to post them wherever you want.

As a courtesy to your readers, you should probably put in a disclaimer that you have "cross-posted" the article to other sites (and name the sites).

Originally Posted by Wyn76

This might sound like a silly question but what about one's own personal postings from other sites? I have 2 ,+ the one that I own, generational boards that I post to with their own seperate audiences. Rather than type the same message 3 times I simply copy and post the message to all 3 boards. Can I as the author have the copyright rights?

What other boards are you talking about, Wyn? Might be nice to put together a list of all generational discussion sites.

Tx, Steve

Legal action was recently threatened against the Drudge Retort parody site for quoting segments of Associated Press articles into some sort of comment or forum section. Since it's not uncommon for posters to quote entire articles here, this development might be worth paying attention to.

Which is what makes the AP's new stance so laughable. They want to collect $12.50 for every 5-20 word quotation from their articles, and they've been going after smaller social bookmarking sites first.