I have seen the discussion on this and I believe this is something that should be investigated. I am not a lawyer and I do not play one on TV. I do not know copyright law and whether the current TOS limits posters in any way. Again, I believe it is something that we need a legal opinion on. So absent that legal foundation, let me tell you what I do believe.
I believe that most posters don’t care. Few have likely read the TOS at all and even fewer care about who owns the rights to republish their question about how hard it is to upgrade to first class on airline X. That said, to the few that do care, this is an important issue and it could materially impact their willingness to contribute. Furthermore, the ones that care enough to value ownership are the ones that have content to contribute that will likely be of real value to the community. So, while few will be passionate about this issue, I do believe it is important and should be addressed in an aggressive manner.
Next, I would like to the see TOS be changed. There are really only 2 possible outcomes of the legal investigation: that it limits ownership or that it doesn’t. If the TOS currently strips ownership of posters, then it can cause people not to contribute valuable content. That’s bad for the community. If the TOS are essentially invalid and copyright law protects the poster, then it implies a loss of ownership and might scare some posters without actually accomplishing anything. Either way, the current TOS negatively impacts content creating and information exchange.
I understand that FT provides a service and needs to be able to protect itself. They must have the right to moderate and edit posts and they may at some point want to package content here for other purposes. In my mind, the most reasonable compromise may be to establish joint ownership and provide that either FT or the contributor has the right to reproduce individual posts in part or in whole and where the FT can edit or eliminate content it finds to be in conflict with its rules and conditions. But prior to firming any such conclusion I would want to see a legal opinion about what everyone’s rights are under current law.