tye wrote:

I have posted (my words) to a public forum so I have clearly granted the forum the license to distribute these words via the forum... forever.

This reasoning is sound right up to the point where you get to "forever." While it can reasonably be argued that posting a self-owned written work to a public forum implicitly gives license to the forum's owners to republish the work on the forum, it is doubtful that the implied license would be held by a court to override specific, written communications to the contrary. In other words, if you email Perl Monks and say that you don't want them to use your posts anymore, they would probably be in violation of U.S. copyright law if they didn't abide by your request.

But if I expect to have that right of revocation, then I am probably a fool at least because things change and forum sites have little motivation to ensure that they will always provide the resources to allow me to take back what I have given.

The problem with this logic is that the burden is upon the owners of the forum site to demonstrate that they have license to republish your works, should the issue of infringement come to trial or should you issue a DMCA "takedown" request to the site's ISP. Whether the owners give you the tools or have the resources to remove your works is immaterial. If you tell them they're not allowed to use your works, the burden is upon them not to – or to demonstrate that they have license to use your works despite your notice to the contrary.

PerlMonks should probably add a 'legal notice' page...

Absolutely. Because of the burdens placed upon the site's owners when it comes to republishing others' works, it is important that Perl Monks take reasonable measures to ensure that authors of works posted to the site understand that by posting they are granting license to Perl Monks to republish their works on the forum. Rather than having a legal notice page, I think that every page upon which there is a form to submit comments ought to give notice – right next to the Submit button – that posting to the site grants the site's owners license to republish the material on the site in perpetuity.

PerlMonks should also add some technical means for preventing people from deleting their contributions

I must disagree. People ought to be able to remove their own contributions. First, being able to remove bad posts lowers the barrier to contribution because posters need not worry about whether their ideas are good enough not to come back and haunt them later. They can contribute freely, knowing that if later they regret a posting, they can remove it.

Second, allowing users to remove their own posts lowers the copyright burden upon Perl Monks. The fact that Perl Monks allows authors to remove their own posts provides strong evidence that the posts on the site are published with consent. (If the authors didn't want their works published, they could easily remove them.) Further, it would be difficult for a malicious user to threaten Perl Monks with an infringement suit or a takedown notice regarding content that could easily be self-removed.

Cheers,
Tom

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.