CHUNN

Chime in people. Should TanTalk.com remove the inital posting that came from TanToday.com and link back to it? The posting was referring to TanTalk.com and I thought it was legitimate to quote and give credit to Bruce and then comment on the posting.As far as I'm concerned TanTalk.com belongs to the tanning industry ( not the ITA as Bruce would have people believe ). Bruce would never allow anyone to dictate policy or tactics on his board. That's a distinct difference between Bruce and I.I would like the TanTalk.com posters to jump in and reveal there thoughts on the subject.If TanTalk.com posters think it's ok then it's fine with me. If not then I will gladly remove the text and create a Hyperlink! Michael

jcole

Ok, a little surfing on the subject of copyright laws and anonymous public posts reveals that there has been very little court action on this subject.It appears that, since post are often copied or quoted when replied to that an implied license has been granted by the copyright owner (in this case the author) when you post in a public forum. You can specifically revoke this implied license by simply stating that your post may not be copied in part or in whole, or can only appear on a certain site.In absence of such a statement, it appears to be up to the author to register their post with the copyright office and defend their copyright (note: you must register your post with the copyright office in order to bring any court action).Keep in mind, that no one has hashed this out in court yet. Perhaps because that even if infringement were proven, damages would be extremely difficult to substantiate.So a good rule of thumb is if you do not want your post copied when replied to, then you need to say so, explicitly. Such as:This post may only appear on TanTalk.com.Here is some more info…JohnThe following is a quote from: http://www.transend.com.tw/~rmm/copyright.html Proponents of the implied license idea point out that Usenet postings are routinely copied and quoted, and anyone posting to Usenet is granting an implied license for others to similarly copy or quote that posting, too. It's not clear whether such implied license extends beyond Usenet, or indeed, what "Usenet" really means (does it include, for example, Internet mailing lists? Does it include netnews on CD-ROM?). If a posting includes an express limitation on the right to copy or quote, it's not at all certain whether the express limitation or the implied license will control. No doubt it depends on the specific facts. For example, was the limitation clearly visible to the person who did the copying? Was the limitation placed such that it would be visible only after the person who did the copying invested time and money to get the posting, believing it to be without any limitation?The faq goes on to state:These theories are largely speculative, because there has been little litigation to test them in the courts. As a practical matter, most postings, with a small number of notable exceptions, are not registered with the Copyright Office. As such, to prevail in court, the copyright holder would need to show actual damages (see section 2.5). Since most of these cases will result in little or no actual damage, no cases have been be brought; it's simply too expensive to sue for negligible damages.------------------John Cole [IMG]http://www.hsv.net/wb/jcole/solarsoft.gif]

Mike N

I think what you did is just fine. BS does the same thing all the time. He even copies print items, to post to the site. Even when giving credit to original author some of what BS has done can be copywrite infringment. The BS bark is much worse than the bite. ------------------Take A Trip To The Coast...Palm Coast Tann mike@palmcoasttann.com