Well, I would like to know if Discourse makes / provides for special agreements that cannot be directly derived from the particular forum that uses your platform.
It is clear to me that in the end it might not be possible to enforce my legal claims without attorney support.
To digress briefly from the main discussion (which has not yet forked), here are the four consents we explicitly seek:
I suggest the Discourse project considers making this āopenā licensing an option on set up. Or at least documents the process and the diffs relative to the default.
My apologies @Johannes_Ai2, Iām not sure Iām following what you mean. Could you rephrase that for me? (and āpretendā that Iām not very smart 
)
And my apologies to you too @robbie.morrison. I am also not 100% sure what a split topic would look like for this. I do find these discussions very interesting, but I canāt say Iām across all the intricacies.
Under Dutch law, a company cannot impose āunreasonable termsā upon a consumer.
I am not a lawyer but I would bet that this clause would be indeed considered āunreasonableā by any court here in the Netherlands.
Thatās not relevant here, since youāre not in the Netherlands, and you never accepted these ToS. But I just wanted to mention that.
Looking at those original ToS, I see a few issues that could limit your rights to delete.
Yes, thatās exactly the sticking point, which I had already thought of.
But what could be ambiguous about the term āat any timeā?
Otherwise it should have read:
āYou can delete your posts at any time during your membership.ā
Usually the paragraphs that survive beyond the term of an agreement are listed explicitly, so one could argue that every sentence in that ToS would imply āduring the term of the agreementā.
So first they assure me that I can delete my posts at any time and then they use a trick to block / suspend me in order to take this opportunity away from me.
In Germany (and certainly not only there) one would say: āthe contract is immoralā.
(In German: āDer Vertrag ist sittenwidrigā)
From my position, I am unable to determine if there was a ātrickā, nor if their actual goal was to take that opportunity away from you.
Any contract has its obligations for both sides and when the contract ends those obligations come to an end. That is perfectly normal and reasonable and because of that I am not sure whether the contract itself would qualify as sittenwidrig. If there indeed was a ātrickā maybe the trick would qualify as such.
And again:
If I am suspended and unable to access or delete my posts, the forum operator will have de facto ownership and disposition right of my property.
Even a non-lawyer should realize that this is in stark contradiction to normal legal understanding and the statement in the ToS.
No, it does not imply that.
Weāre back to square one I guess, this is pretty much the same thing that you said like 60 posts ago, so Iām not even going to explain why that statement is incorrect.
Setting aside the specific terms of service that might apply in this example, some basics on copyright law in the internet age might help.
The economic right is held by the author and may be assigned to another party or, in some jurisdictions (such as the US), dedicated to the public domain. Alternatively that economic right may be retained and the material licensed to another party as a bespoke license or more generally as a public license. The terms of that license are material: a license may be revoked by one or either side accordingly or implicitly withdrawn through nonāperformance such as the failure to comply with the obligations set out in the license (for instance, the need to retain the license notice on otherwise legitimate redistributions). In passing, IĀ am personally interested in public licenses that also class as open licenses, such as the Creative Commons CCāBYā4.0.
Alleged breaches of the license terms can be prosecuted under copyright law and also under contract law should the prevailing jurisdiction allow (for example, consideration is required under UK contract law and is necessarily lacking for material under public licensing). In some countries (such as France and Germany), a moral right may exist in addition to the economic right. In any case, it is useful to distinguish between the copyright owner specifically and the rights and obligations licensed to third parties or the public more generally.
One can view a license as ādeĀ facto ownershipā but that is not an especially accurate description. Better would be to note that the ability to force licensees to behave in a particular way is related to the jurisdiction, the terms of the license, and the actual actions, including omissions, of that licensee.
The identification of legal jurisdiction is especially problematic for material distributed via internet sites. Some licenses specify a choice of law but that may not necessarily apply or be enforceable. In which case, consideration of who has legal ownership, technical control, and legitimate access, together with the location of hardware, if identifiable, becomes material. Along with more general legal doctrines covering territorial scope.
There is no general right to have material deleted once legitimately published. That process depends entirely on the terms of the license granted when made public, the prevailing law, and the ability to locate and persuade or force publishers and other intermediaries and services to act in accordance with your wishes.
Indeed useful to think carefully before publishing material via the internet (this posting included) and to be aware of the difficulties in effecting deletion once made public.
One thing is undisputed: I, as the (intellectual) creator of a work, am and will always remain the owner of the work. It is therefore exclusively about the rights of disposal and exploitation rights (regardless of the respective legal system).
So it MUST be explicitly stated in the terms and conditions (ToS and/or TaC) that all my rights of disposal (over my posts in this forum) ONLY apply during my forum membership.
And now it is the case (in the TaC, which was added later).
But NOT when I joined the forum (in March 2019).
You are very welcome to sell your copyright in all jurisdictions. And your economic rights extinguish at some point after your death, the time frame varying by jurisdiction. The copyright you claim in your work may also be subject to legal challenge, say, for instance, on the basis that you did not in fact author the work in question.
The copyright arises automatically (without my request / registration, in contrast to patent right or trademark right). If I am not the author (of a work relevant to copyright), there is no copyright. Should I claim that I was the author without actually being the author (for whatever absurd reason), I would have to provide proof of this in order to be able to assert any rights therefrom.
So when I refer to a work that I didnāt create (someone else did), thatās called copyright infringement.
I really donāt know where these (hypothetical) considerations are supposed to lead?
I think my statements are pretty clear and unmistakable.
Falsely claiming copyright (as I remarked) might not involve copyright infringement as the original work might not have been under copyright for a variety of reasons.
To respond to the hypothetical nature of my comments: these issues are often more nuanced and certainly much harder and more risky to enforce than might be hoped.
You would certainly need to provide evidence of authorship if your claims ever made it to court.
Indeed, registration of copyright is a necessary condition for legal action in the United States.
As I have already pointed out several times, it must actually be a work worthy of copyright protection (that is, one that has the required level of creation). This certainly doesnāt apply to a simple post (like āWell done, keep it upā).
However, it applies to demanding (high-quality) posts (like guides / tutorials and extensions).
The threshold for copyright protection in the United Kingdom is intellectual effort and originality need not be present.
I donāt doubt that substantial tutorials would attract copyright in the UK though, that is not in dispute.
BTW, as far as I know, the roots of copyright are in Germany (and go back to Johann W. Goethe).
See e.g. here:
āHistorical development, Goetheās impulseā
At that time, in 1825, at the age of 75, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe asked the Federal Assembly whether the respective author could not be given recognized intellectual property through an act.
The Federal Assembly initially did not comply with the request. Due to concerns about jurisdiction, the request was delegated to the federal states. On January 23, 1826, a privilege of the Prussian king was issued. Earlier, Prince Metternich had already written to Goethe and informed him that the Emperor would grant a privilege against the reprinting of the new edition.
Five years after Goetheās death, in 1837, the Federal Assembly decided on copyright with a protection period of 10 years from the publication of the work. The term of protection was extended in 1845 to 30 years after the authorās death. Copyright protection was introduced in the North German Confederation in 1870, which was adopted by the German Reich in 1871.
Internationally, an international treaty on copyright was concluded for the first time in 1886 with the Berne Convention, which is valid today in a revised version. It set the minimum term of protection for all works at 50 years, with the exception of photographic and cinematographic works.
