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OT: Copyright of posts? 29-Sep-2010 At 11:40:12 AM cruze

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I'll bite.

As davidh said, what constiutes a "work" is the key element here. A recent court case on copyright law held that a television guide was not a work and so copying of that guide did not constitute a breach of copyright. Unless your forum post is determined to be an "original literary work" you will not have a cause of action in breach of copyright. In the less likely event that it is determined to be an original literary work you may have a cause of action if you can establish that another party "copied" a "substantial part" of your work. These are jargonistic terms that are the subject of the ongoing Men At Work dispute with respect to a musical work, but if they quote the substance of your forum post you then they are probably copying a subsantial part.

So what? Well, unless you sue them for breach of copyright, then you can whinge all you want and noone needs to listen.

Anyone can breach copyright if they want to. I can sell rip offs of Simon Carter's pictures if I want to, and it would be up to him to take action against me. I would be very foolish to do so however, because it is highly likely that it will cost me a lot of money if he takes offence to what I am doing. Another way of looking at it is to say the law doesn't physically stop me from breaking the law, it just warns me that if I do then there may be ramifications.

Other than copyright, there may be causes of action under defamation/slander if you are misrepresented when your post is quoted, but a more qualified person should comment on that topic.