On the ownership of TakChess

[chrisw]

So you can confirm Chris and Thorsten's account of things, that the forum is owned by the members, and that the deal with ChessUSA was that they can host it only as long as the members are satisfied with this arrangement and don't decide to seek other hosting? (Simple question; Yes/No can suffice...)

BTW, the funny thing is that I never needed the ftp access to clone the forum elsewhere (it being based on public software obtainable anywhere), but that I would only need it to move the repaired version back.

Please stop inventing “accounts of things” and associating them with me.

The “forum” is “owned” by the “group of individuals” who conceived the idea of a forum, agreed inter alia to support it by transferring their posting from rgcc to it, etc etc and gave ICD the right to host it on basis terms and conditions.

ICD can continue “hosting” as long as the “group of individuals” doesn’t call them into breach and revoke the hosting permission.
Revocation or not, the same “GOI” can give hosting right to anyone else, I would assume. I don’t recollect the term “exclusive right” in the agreement.

The only chess programmers remaining from that group of individuals are me and Ed. Bob would be but I’m told he is gone from these things now. Bruce is long gone.

Custodianship of an intangible piece of IP is not very useful save for conferring some marginal status onto some continuity forum. But, as everybody knows, it’s the ICD actual control over the domain name that is really the issue. It gives them/Quentin blocking rights.

[smatovic]

I suggest the founders, elected moderators and ChessUSA start a off-board dialog to resolve this.

I myself am not interested in 20+ years old scores stuff, but in a working TC forum.

--
Srdja

[bob]

I'm not gone, just enjoying retired life. The world has come to a clone-happy place, which is OK by me since the majority should rule. But I don't particularly want to participate in such development. I occasionally reply to something here, but not very often.

My take on this specific issue is that the posts can NOT be claimed by anyone. I certainly signed no such agreement. There are two possibilities I can see, and I am not sure which applies in this specific case.

(1) everything one writes is copyrighted (unless the author specifically denies the copyright in writing). Which means no one but me "owns" the posts I have written over the years.

(2) Everything posted here is public, which means anybody can make a copy of anything I have written.

I tend to think that for message boards, (2) is the applicable standard.

Someone should copy everything before it goes missing, if anyone believes the years of posts here should be preserved. Not sure what brought this discussion on, I assume something is going on within upper management, not members of CCC itself. I'll keep watching...

[hgm]

For most message boards you have to agree to some conditions before you can post. I think this is legally equivalent to a signed contract. These conditions could involve a transfer of copyrights, or a license to use the posted texts in a certain way, such as keeping the text readable through the board indefinitely. For phpBB forums the standard license terms are:

As a user you agree to any information you have entered to being stored in a database. While this information will not be disclosed to any third party without your consent, neither “TalkChess.com” nor phpBB shall be held responsible for any hacking attempt that may lead to the data being compromised.

[chrisw]

I'm not gone, just enjoying retired life. The world has come to a clone-happy place, which is OK by me since the majority should rule. But I don't particularly want to participate in such development. I occasionally reply to something here, but not very often.

My take on this specific issue is that the posts can NOT be claimed by anyone. I certainly signed no such agreement. There are two possibilities I can see, and I am not sure which applies in this specific case.

(1) everything one writes is copyrighted (unless the author specifically denies the copyright in writing). Which means no one but me "owns" the posts I have written over the years.

(2) Everything posted here is public, which means anybody can make a copy of anything I have written.

This is indeed so. I just made a copy of what you wrote and am about to repost it …..

I tend to think that for message boards, (2) is the applicable standard.

Indeed! Indented messaging on message boards couldn’t work without.

Someone should copy everything before it goes missing, if anyone believes the years of posts here should be preserved. Not sure what brought this discussion on, I assume something is going on within upper management, not members of CCC itself. I'll keep watching...

[hgm]

Copying to an unrelated forum would still be aviolation of copyrights, though.

[bob]

I don't think so for the individual posts. Each poster legally holds the copyright for anything he writes. If he posts on a public forum, he has given up his copyright for THAT particular forum. But not in general.

So the question would be would everyone that has posted here agree to have their posts copied elsewhere.

Be a good question for a practicing copyright lawyer.

[gaard]

Copying to an unrelated forum would still be aviolation of copyrights, though.

IANAL, but here in the US that would probably be covered under Fair Use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

The GDPR is a whole nother can of worms.