Copyright issues

[whole diary]

[grahame]

I am posting this purely for clarification / to ensure it's on record, and not because of any major issue that we've had.   It's open for comment / dicussion here and will probably go on the end of the sticky topic in "Intro and chat" once any oddities have been ironed out!

There are two copyright issues involved when you post to a forum - firstly, there's other people's copyright which controls what you can and can't post up - and that's something which, if you're in doubt, you need to check with them.  Typically, you are allowed to post short extracts for comment provided that you give your source.  Images don't count as "short extracts", so that if you paste an image from another website (or hotlink to it) without permission, you're likely to be breaking copyright rules.  As site operator, I have the legal responsibility to ensure that any legal infringements (including copyright) are corrected within a reasonable time of being brought to my attention. Typically I or one of the admin / moderation team will ask the poster of the material that infringes (or we suspect infringes) to clarify the situation and make any necessary corrections. That may be as simple as "yes, I do have permission" or "I wrote it", or it may be a change. Should there be no action taken by the original poster, or should the breach be so major as to require immediate action, one of the moderators or administrators may delete the whole post, or modify it as they see fit, to bring it within the rules.

Second, there are the copyright issues of the material that you post - i.e. our protection of your copyright.  When you post something on a board here, you're agreeing that it can be stored in the computers we run, and within our backups. You're agreeing that it can be viewed by any visitors to our site in any of the formats we currently use, or may choose to use at any date in the future.  It may also be used by Google, Yahoo and other search engines and automata, which have access to the data on our site. It may be included in news feeds (in formats such as RSS^▸ (Regional Spatial Strategy)) that we may from time to time make available.  Your material may also be quoted (with due credit) on this board or other pages on the same server as part of other people's replies and comments.  Please note that there is little that the operators of the forum can do to practically restrict any of these uses, so if you don't agree with this distribution of your writing, the best I can suggest is that you don't post.

Having made those comments about the distribution and use of what you post, I want to make it very clear that copyright of postings is RETAINED by the author who by posting gives us the permissions described.  If you are a reader of our boards and want to use materials you see here for other purposes, it is up to you to approach the copyright holder to obtain appropriate permission, which you should do prior to making use of his / her material.  The private message system is a greta way to do this.

[grahame]

An update LONG after the original post here, in answer to queries yesterday evening

When you post on this forum, you make your writing publicly visible on most boards (different situation on Rumour Mill, Frequent Posters, TransWilts CRP^▸ (Community Rail Partnership) supporters Board, and in the moderators's co-ordination area) and that means that you may find yourself linked to, and even quoted, from elsewhere.  That's something that's very much grown over the years since this thread was started, with people habitually sharing on Facebook, but it still comes as a bit or a surprise the first time you find your words somewhere unexpected.

Copyright in material here remains with the original poster - by posting, though, you are agreeing to it being read, stored, indexed through search engines and - unless you add something very specific to your content - you may find yourself occasionally quoted for critical review and comment elsewhere.  It's the sort of thing we do a lot here - look at all the news quotes, with links to the full story.

Personally, I will occasionally post / comment elsewhere about public visible material on this forum - almost inevitably just a link to a thread in which I have contributed, and indeed usually to one of my own posts. I feel free to quote myself when I do this, but I would seek permission from the original author before quoting a member elsewhere and if I did it would then be with full credit.   This same courtesy applies, I believe, would apply to all of the moderator team and I hope to our signed-up members too.  That does not stop others (guests here) from quoting, perhaps quoting out of context, etc; ... that's why we have boards such as Frequent Posters, and that's where our regular contributors should write if they're concerned about someone that none of us knows quoting them somewhere else.

This old topic was re-awakened yesterday evening as a general query about our policy, and this lead me to a case where a link to our forum was posted in another rail forum, by one of our members, and the administrator there took it upon himself to modify our member's post to that forum adding an appreciable chunk of the original post from the coffee shop. It has been explained to me that this other board has a policy of requiring content as well as links to be posted, to make reading clearer, and to ensure that the story remains complete even if the URL linked to becomes dead; I suspect it's also done in order to reduce people moving away from that other board to ours as they're reading - "protectionism"!

Policy here?

a) We have no objection to links elsewhere to posts on this forum - indeed it's the lifeblood of the web.   Our URLs are designed to remain fixed and not change over the years; re-writing of history is minimised and only done where there is good reason (I can think of three "legal" cases in 6 years).

b) We politely ask our members to check with the original poster prior to pasting member's writings elsewhere, and to respect the answer given.  In the event of a member going against this and repeatedly copying lots of material elsewhere and without permission, I suspect our admin / moderator team would get a bit unhappy.

c) We cannot prevent non-members copying material, but it's rude and impolite for them to do so without asking. If it happens, the best we can do is ask the other site's members and / or administrators to remove the material, and if we do that we're really doing it as a helpful backup to you - our member who originally posted - as the material's copyright remains with you and if the bounds have been broken, you're the one with the final redress.

In the current case, I personally feel that the admin of the other site is very much out of order in quoting without permission, and in modifying the topic posted by one of our members there in such a way that - at first glance - it looks as if our member crossposted.  The case is made even worse by the fact that having been altered by an admin "over there" disguised as one of our members, that member of ours is now locked out of the post and cannot go back and remove the post which has caused the questioning.

This situation remains under discussion here between our moderators / admins and our member concerned - so this may turn out to be an interim post.