Update to Forum Rules

Ummm,

I understand about the legal concern, and I have seen entire posts copied from other sources.

However, your policy goes against the developments in Web 2.x aggregation of content and sharing content across multiple portals (federation).

See United Federation of the Social Web

I will sometimes quote a paragraph or two here as a TEASER clearly linked to the source.

Even if I were to paraphrase it, I do not think that is a viable alternative, and just a brief description and a link is also not really helpful.

Will I be censored for duplicating content here that I also post on my personal site (for which I own the rights)? Sometimes I do that too.

In these days of Facebook Connect, the ban on aggregated/federated content is archaic.

For an example of an aggregated content community see Yahoo's MyBlogLog, which includes feeds from a couple of my personal sites, as well as some other content http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/decibelplaces/

And what about http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/buzz-newsroom-combines-wordpress-an...

Most sites state within their TOS in no way can their content (text/images etc) be copied and used on another site or forum, and usually state "in part or in full".

Therefore it would be breaking that sites Terms to even copy and paste a small snippet. I know it can be useful to include the bit of text you are referring to from another source, but it's not essential and a link to the text will suffice.

I think some common sense is to be used...

If you are posting text/content you explicitly own the rights to, and therefore rights to paste/post it wherever you want, then there are no copyright issues.
But why would you put it in a quote as from your own site? If it's your text, just copy and paste it into the post body as if you just typed it.

How exactly?

If there are any real rules towards what you are claiming (which I doubt), it would be to allow people to rights to post text from other places where copyright is in place, but not to enforce sites like this that they must allow it to be used.

This website is well within its rights to declare you cannot post content from any other source.
And no other websites terms, international terms or laws, local laws, copyright or any other laws or individual ownership rights of any kind can (or would) counter that right of this (or any other) website.

No, no, no, this has nothing to do with aggregated content. It's purely about members posting content that does not belong to them. We've seen increasing indicdents of this over the past few months. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense in the context of the topic. Sometimes it's copied from another poster within the same topic. The other day someone copied a page from Google Webmaster Guidelines and posted it as a new topic.

Posting exceprts and linking to the original is fine, as is posting any content hat you own.

This is really more about keeping up the quality content rather than copyright infringement.

I will re-word the rules to clarify. I'm also conscious that most if not all of the people we're targetting with this rule don't speak english very well so I wanted to keep the wording simple.