Who is Joe Tedesco?

[Dunbar Plumbing]

FWIW, I consulted an attorney about who each person's posts really belong to.
He said that even if you copyright your posts it's not all that clear.

How so,


and explain the reasoning why you did just that.

[Thatguy]

How so, and explain the reasoning why you did just that.

I wanted to delete my posts from a forum on which I ultimately decided that I wasn't welcome. I got the runaround and my posts stayed.

So, I wondered if I had any legal recourse. You'd be surprised how things change when you make a credible threat. So I e-mailed a disgruntled engineer that I once worked with who became a patent attorney.

I find out it's very easy to do some things: get a credit card, get a cell phone, post messages, buy a car.
It's not so easy to undo those things; all of a sudden the same people who signed you up are not smiling anymore, and they no longer "comprendo inglés."

[jimbo]

It seems that on most forums, not all but most, you can edit your own posts, including deletel

[jwelectric]

Terry owns this forum so anything I bring in here and leave belongs to him.

So before I leave he will own this post.

[brownizs]

The post actually belongs to the Forum owner, not the person posting. So the Copyright goes to Terry.

[Cookie]

http://www.olywa.net/jgerecht/publish/copyright.htm

[frenchie]

Sorry, gang, you're wrong on this one - copyright belongs to the author of the post, unless s/he specifically & explicitely gives it to the publisher.

This is one of the few bits of internet copyright law that's pretty clear: some forums state, in their terms of use, that all posts become property of the forum - and have lost court cases over them.

The copyright's still yours: they can't (for example) sue you for publishing the same post elsewhere. And they can't (another example) publish a book made up of all your posts (unless their ToU specified you to be granting them a full licence, like some websites do).

What you DO grant them, by posting, is an implied (limited) license to display your posts.

So in practical terms, in this case, the upshot's the same: you granted them the right to publish, and there's no way you can force them to delete your old posts. It'd be like an author demanding that his publisher track down & burn every copy of a book he wrote...

[jar546]

I don't agree with what was done but unfortunately he was given the capability to so this. It is obvious that Terry had no idea this was going to happen but ultimately this is a breach of trust but I am not sure that under the circumstances this is a criminal act.

It is unfortunate that this happened and consider it a lesson learned the hard way. There are plenty of posts to come in this section and it will be slowly rebuilt with newer, fresh information.