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Topic Date User

Posts 25-May-2005 At 12:26:51 PM Onsight

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On 23/05/2005 Mike wrote:
>The question of who owns the messages though needs to be answered.
snip
>… Kind of like creating a document.
>Sure it's in the public domain, but the words in the document still belongs
>to the author. But I don't know.

I think this is a bit like copyright and when you get photos or text published. The author always retains copyright of their work (unless they’ve been so silly as to sign – or agree to - something that has completely unnecessarily given it away!) and the publisher is somehow granted reproductions rights. As far as this site is concerned then I think it might come down to any Terms and Conditions of use that you set out. I don’t see why you couldn’t put in your T&C’s something whereby posters assign you a more general reproduction licence (who knows – there could be a book in this one day).

>The idea that I myself, as site owner, might be personally responsible
>for what a thousand people say on a bad hair day, is not a little bit scary.
>I certainly hope this is not the case! …
I don’t doubt for a second that if someone writes defamatory or threatening posts on the forum then they can be held legally accountable – just the same as if their words were published in print. As far as responsibility as site owner is concerned Mike, I reckon you might want to look at introducing some Terms and Conditions of use that people have to agree to before posting for the first time (or for all of us from a certain point in time). That link from Martin is interesting, check out point 10…
http://www.oznetlaw.net/subcategories.asp?topicid=39&categoryid=177&subcategoryid=290
I think that would go a long way towards alleviating any defamation concerns you might have (mind you, I’m not a lawyer!). Also, I’d have thought that if you had a clause somehow stating that users are responsible for obtaining – or ensuring they have - any copyright permissions for photos or text from other sources, then that’d also address any potential problems there. Oh, of course it might also need to say you’re not responsible for the checking the copyright of material posted, and that if anyone has a complaint or concern then to contact the moderators and any offending material will be removed…

Basically, IMO, I think that people are responsible for what they post, but you need to ensure there’s some mechanism to ensure the responsibility rests with the users and can’t get palmed off to you, legally, should the shit hit the fan somehow.

Finally (and I don’t want to create work for you Mike!), if all this setting in stone is going to work, then I think there should be a simple mechanism whereby anyone with concerns can contact the moderators easily. If it’s something they want kept personal, then they can always PM or email you Mike, or one of the other known moderators, but no one moderator is online 24/7. So if there was like a link at the top of the forum home page which enabled anyone to post to a thread that was hidden to all but the mods, then they could post concerns there (for example, “hi mods, so and such has just called me a *^%$ %^&@~# and as you might imagine I find that personally offence. Can you help?), then the first mod to go online would see it and any mod who takes action can note there what they did. And if something is really tricky or important and needs discussing, then the mods could always discuss it there.

Just some thoughts.