Allen does not hold copyright of the content of your posts, even though it's said, somewhere, that he does. But saying it does doesn't make it so.
Just for the sake of it, I clicked on "register" just to see what type of legal disclaimer people must swear by. The terms of the site in regards to copyright, don't have a snowball's chance in hell of standing up in court if ever someone collected the posts
they made and published it into a book or turned into a movie. Why, you might ask. Just look. Nowhere in the terms and conditions does it say that posting on here is essentially handing over your copyright to SoSuave. It says that you can't post
other people's work but that is the full extent of it. Nowhere do you explicitly say something along the lines of "I give my ownership of copyright to Allen" which is a requirement of copyright law.
Any message posted to this forum becomes the property of SoSuave.com/Global Marketing/Allen Thompson and may be used at some point in the future.
Note the word
property. That's not copyright. That's saying that when you post, you post on Allen's computer. But he still doesn't own the intellectual rights to it. Even if--
even if--in that disclaimer it was stated that by posting on here you were handing your exclusive copyright rights over to SoSuave,
it wouldn't be legally valid. Here is a snippet from the US Copyright office:
Any or all of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights or any subdivision of those rights may be transferred, but the transfer of exclusive rights is not valid unless that transfer is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent.
There you go.
I personally plan to use some posts that I wrote and publish them into a book, for money, because this forum is great for fleshing out thoughts. There's nothing legally stopping me from my big plan and there's nothing to stop anyone else.
