Who has the copyright to posts on the forums?

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

I was wondering if when you post text or a picture on a trains.com forum if trains.com gets the copyright to it.

2

In general, the author of the post or material posted retains the copyright. Kalmbach is granted a free license to the material. See

http://www.trains.com/content/static/termsandconditions.asp

for more information.

3

However, I’ve noticed that users have been heedless in posting copyrighted material (such as verbatim news stories) to this forum. Kalmbach would not have any right to this material.

4

There is nothing wrong with posting the news stories on this forum as the original author, aka CNN or whoever has the copyright. Posting it is considered a free use domain.

5

If you mean “fair use”, you can still not just copy and paste an entire news article. Only portions of copyrighted material can be considered fair use and even then it’s a gray area.That’s just my understanding of the subject.

6

The predominant method for posting news stories seems to be to include a link, vs a cut and paste (although that does happen), so the reader is getting the information directly from the source. There is certainly no copyright infringement in that. IIRC, most “cut and paste” posts attribute the source which, while it may not meet the letter of the law, certain entertains the spirit.

7

Having done much research into history, I’ve found quoteing news articles has been going on for some 100 years or more.

Mostly it goes like this:

The Lassen Advocate runs a story printed by a rival paper, in this case the Lassen Mail, the Advocate simply states that the Lassen Mail is reporting this…then quotes the entire article. Its not really under “fair use” but its been exceptable for years.

Jim

8

This is from this forum’s terms of use:

“By posting or submitting content to this site, you:

  1. grant Kalmbach Publishing Company and its affiliates and licensees the right to use, reproduce, display, perform, adapt, modify, distribute, have distributed, and promote the content in any form, anywhere and for any purpose; and
  2. warrant and represent that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content and that public posting and use of your content by Kalmbach Publishing Company will not infringe or violate the rights of any third party.”

By posting the entire article, unless you are the copyright holder, you’re violating the second paragraph. Obviously, Kalmbach still has no rights to material copyrighted to others if it appears in one of their forums.

That’s also my understanding. The gray area is how much constitutes fair use. I once wanted to include in my Web site a NY Times article that was about 1000 words. Being above-board I called their group that deals with copyright licenses. For the right to use their article they wanted $600/year. That’s what is at stake. The proper method of reference to full text or images is through links, as mentioned by another poster.