JimH is right. None of the worst-case scenarios one might imagine reading those disclaimers are enforceable in court.
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The website and its contents are owned or licensed by the website.
This is a 100% factually correct statement. Every single piece of content here is either owned by me or licensed to me by you for the purpose of displaying it here.
There is an even "scarier" statement shown on the registration page:
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By posting on this website, you grant the administration and the owners of this site a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, sub-licenseable and transferable license to use in any way, reproduce and distribute your posts and prepare derivative works of your posts without any express permission or compensation.
Which basically means I can resize images, compile the digest and produce other kinds of derivative works.
This protects me from someone posting a picture, and then suing me while claiming that I owe them money for displaying their work in a way in which they didn't think it would be displayed; such as in reduced size or shown to browsers from Indiana, or some other ridiculous claim like that.
So the disclaimer is intentionally broad to cove me.
At the same time, I wouldn't be able to take your picture and sell or "sub-license" it to be printed in some magazine as if it were my own, because there isn't a judge out there who would support it.
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Most sites do allow you the option to delete all/any content posted.
That's not really true. Most
forums don't allow removing your own posts or even editing them after some interval (like 10 minutes, or one hour on UHH).
This is a forum, so it needs to be run like a forum.
It's true that most image collection/portfolio/etc. sites allow you to manage your content (it would be weird if they didn't), but not forums. And I have no intention of turning this website into a portfolio management platform.
On a forum, if you delete one user's topic, you also end up deleting a bunch of replies posted by the other users. So every time a large number of topics is removed because of a "please delete everything I posted here" request made by one person, you end up deleting posts made by hundreds of other people.
And then, a lot of those people contact you to ask why their post counts are down or why they can no longer find an answer they've "spent so much time researching and writing."
So it becomes customer service nightmare.
My official position, if you will, is this: if you don't want it shown here indefinitely, then don't post it here in the first place. And the disclaimers are there specifically to support it.
It might sound harsh, but I've been running forums for a long time. And I came to the conclusion that it's better to do things this way for a multitude of long-term reasons. With this being a new forum, some of the reasons might not make sense yet, but I don't expect it to be any different from what I've managed before.
Of course, in cases when there is a legitimate reason for deletion, I usually delete the content. Most of the time, it means deleting just one or two posts.
But if a user wants me to delete "everything" because he is having a bad day or just out of spite, then it will depend solely on how much time and patience I have to deal with the fallout at that particular point it time.
Sometimes, I might delete the content right away. Other times, I would delete it within a week or when time permits. Yet, in some instances, I would say I won't do it unless he/she files a complaint in federal court and gets an injunction compelling me to delete the content.
I know how it sounds, but that's how it is.
There is another way to look at it.
In an abstract form, there is an unspoken deal being made between a user and a forum owner. It's true for every forum out there. The deal is: the user supplies the content while the forum owner supplies the audience.
It's a one-to-one relationship extrapolated to all users.
People are social creatures. And as such, we all want our work to be seen, judged, and commended on, our ideas heard, and our opinions voiced.
(Heck, I set this forum up just so that I can talk to others about using my newly bought 7D.)
That's what a forum provides -- an opportunity for any given user to reach others.
At the same time, forums wouldn't exist if nobody posted anything. So a forum gets content, which in turn, helps attract more users, which in turn provides an even greater audience for each individual user's posts.
So if a user posts something, I run it in the digest, host it on the site, and try to give his/her post as much exposure as I can in the normal course of running the forum. I perform my end of the deal.
But if later on (when the post has faded away) the user wants me to remove the content for which I already supplied the audience, I feel like he/she isn't keeping up with his/her end of the deal. I can't undo all the eyeballs I've sent to that user's content, can I? And if I had a choice, I would much rather send people to some other user's posts, but there is no way to change the past. That's why I keep the content most of the time. It's more of an emotional thing that logical.
Besides, there are two ways to handle copyright issues. The right way and the wrong way. I'll post about it next, and will explain why all the talk about keeping or deleting content is purely emotional.