Possession is 9/10ths

Hey fellow Bombers.

I'm curious about who owns the content of these forum posts, namely, the community's contributions and the minutia pertaining to that sort of thing.

Anyone know if that information available to the public?

@rorie could probably answer this

Never really thought about that, if we are discussing a gameplay trailer and embed it in the forum post that trailer of course won't be our content. As far as the highlighted community content that you probably see on the front page I would imagine that could vary depending on what elements are being used in the forum/blog post.

Ok.

So then CBS? I guess I'm wondering who is making the rules and the logic behind them. Especially since the landscape for acceptable forum protocol is changing.

Thanks for the input folks.

Can you elaborate on what you're actually getting at? Technically CBSi owns all submissions to the site, but I feel like there is an underlying question you're not asking. Maybe not.

@mb: I think I'm still trying to find the right words to ask. Good on you to pick that up over text!

I wanna say I'm interested in who is accountable to who and for what.

Do you mean like, if someone posts something on the forum or wiki that is libellous are csi liable?

@thomasnash: Sure, that'd be an interesting situation. Especially since cbs employees are amending forum posts to their tastes. The argument could be made that thought and intent are changed as they are filtered through another party.

How am I assured as a consumer that my intellectual contributions are handled justly? And who (is it 'to whom'?) are the filters accountable to?

Is this about your topic that got locked?

@massivemix: Sounds like something is really on your mind, maybe ya should pm the mods with full details.I am assuming that this topic is continuing in a somewhat ambiguous manner because it might be a subject you don't want to discuss fully on the forums.

@massivemix: I am going to take a wild guess and say that this is in reference to your thread that recently got locked. I would honestly PM @rorie about this, as there is very little users like us can do for you. You had a lot of people talking the the thread before it got locked, so I don't think your concern went unheard. Regardless of the amount of people who agree/disagree with you, take it up with Rorie. He is a really good go-to guy, and generally acts wisely.

And to be quite honest, I would take his locking of your thread too seriously. Maybe retry doing this in a couple of days, after the heat from the recent stunt on Twitter dies down. The guys are under a lot of scrutiny right now, and its very understandable why they want to shut down any kind of inflammatory (in their eyes) forum threads that can spread their already separated focus. Not to mention the community is really sore right now as well. The past couple of days have been pretty rough with both sides going to war on the topic, on a place called the internet where there is never an end to argument that suits everyone.

In general terms, what ever you write is copyrighted to you but service has the right to modify. In this particular case, CBSi has reserves the right to do whatever they deem necessary with content anyone creates here.

For most things that is okay. If you are really concerned about protecting content, you shouldn't be posting on a publicly available message board. Instead you should be holding it on a service you control.

I assume when you sign up to the site you approve a user agreement absolving CBSi and GB of legal fault. So if you set up a drug deal or post personal information that gets stolen, CBSi nor GB would be liable for any damages, criminal or otherwise.

As for who owns the content posted on the forums. I bet the GB staff would say that's all yours, but legally I bet CBSi would say that's all theirs. They own the serves, or at least rent them, and store all this information at their expense.

Hopefully that's about right and answered you question.

I'm just going to close this because there is no one around over the long weekend to answer legal questions about this sort of thing, and everyone else is just speculating on what is or isn't the case. You should send an email to support@giantbomb.com and Matt Rorie will get back to you as quickly as he can.