Thanks, Hawk. I usually do read Terms of Service but evidently skipped or clicked through those when I created my account since I was on a mission to address an issue we were having at discuss.python.org.
I’m impressed with Discourse’s liberal terms basically granting the user with full control and ownership of content they post and only reserves the most reasonable exceptions for Discourse and other users. But I’m not surprised, since the folks at Discuss appear to be uniformly decent people. 
If I read the intent of this topic correctly, it’s about…
-
whether the platform owner can claim ownership and control of the content posted by a user
- through TOU?
- by default?
-
what would be the default “common law” Terms in the absence of an explicit TOU?
Mind you-- I’m not advocating for a ruling since I think that the right to private contract should be respected (I’m just surprised that we can’t find a ruling this far down the road of internet usage). [1] Private contracts do sometimes lead to messy situations where weaker parties have wrongfully been put at a disadvantage, though, and society may then decide to step in via parliamentary law + the courts (it takes both, though sometimes judges overreach and try to make law) and decide how to “best” conduct the activity in general practice. The context here is “does it happen often enough and with severe enough consequences that it adversely affects society at large?”
Do you mean ‘other Discourse instances?’ (I wouldn’t expect this to mean “all other forums”.) I don’t know that such legal nexus between forums exists in the various international legal venues and it definitely doesn’t seem that an implicit extrapolation or extension would occur. The (my) expected view is that an instance owner can create a different contract with their users–and that owner/operator would be on the hook for violations of individual copyright.
This is the sort of technical question that almost makes the professional fees charged by the typical lawyer/barrister worthwhile–if they were half or a third of what’s typical in the U.S. and UK that is. ($350/hr | €350/hr | ₤300)
If I create a great platform that people want to use, and part of the explicitly known arrangement is that I own all content, I think that’s a straightforward case of free enterprise. If the terms are objectionable, it will reduce my traffic and I should be able to decide what the right balance is. ↩︎