The following is not a legal advice. I am not an attorney. However, I wanted to correct a common perception that keeps coming up in terms of copyright of electronic posts on these boards.

As lairdb pointed out earlier, posting here DOES NOT imply putting your writing in public domain. FT claims ownership to the copyright (as opposed to being in public domain) purely as a result of any terms of agreement that assign the handle to post to this board.

The contract that gives a handle to participate in these boards has the following section which implies that the posts are owned by the board. I am not sure if this has been tested in courts or will withstand legal scrutiny.

The reason I say this is because of my reading of a related but not directly similar case. Recently courts ruled that print media did not get electronic rights assigned to them (huge liabilities for press that sold articles written by authors for print media in an electronic form). It is conceivable that a prolific poster who wishes to publish a book solely based on her/his posts can claim true copyright to that material as opposed to Randy or this board. If I were on the jury and if the law was not clear, I would side with the author.

Also, morally if not legally, if the board owners claim a right to the copyright to all material they could also be held liable for consequences in certain cases. My guess is that the ownership is claimed for practical reasons to "excerpt" in other media owned by Randy and Co. and not to commercialize individual writings. Wholesale use of a prolific posters writings may require a whole different treatment.

I also noticed that most of the times, the remedy for violating guidelines is deleting of the post or handle and NOT editing of the post which is more in the spirit of respecting authorship.

------------ excerpts from the policies displayed during registration -----

Who owns my post?

For the sake of simplicity, we'd say that we own anything posted on FlyerTalk. Our reasoning is that we have the power to edit or delete any such post if we, representing the community, find it provides more harm than value to FlyerTalk. Also, if a member decides they no longer want to participate in the community, we would find it difficult to go into the database and delete each post an individual had made. Excerpts from posts to FlyerTalk may appear in InsideFlyer magazines, books, or other materials.