Gambling City Forums

There are actually two copyright issues involved in such a case.

The person who writes a post has the copyright to it. He is free to post it anywhere he wants to unless his post has been purchased by the initial publisher (in this case, CM) but no other publisher has the right to use it without the initial poster's permission. (This does not apply to short sections from it, which makes it a "fair use" issue.)

The second issue is the overall content of a site. That belongs to the publisher. If I were to copy a thread from CM and post it on another site, I would be guilty of violating CM's copyright. In fact, if I were to copy a single post from CM's site but include headers or graphics that CM included, I would also be guilty of violating his copyright.

In short, with the exception of "fair use" matters, I would need the original poster's permission to copy his work and could not include anything that CM, or other posters on CM's site added to that post.

There are two exceptions to this. As the initial publisher, CM could give permission to copy any post on his site even if the original poster does not. The second exception is information -- that cannot be protected by copyright, only the manner of expressing that information can.

Hence, if someone discovers that the owner of Cheat Now Casino has made no payments to any players and publishes that fact on CM or anywhere else, that information, in itself, enjoys no copyright protection. However, the person who makes that post does own the copyright to the wording he used in revealing the information.

Just as an off-topic point of information, as the manager of Gambling Grumbles, I allow any person or site to copy anything that is posted on GG under condition that GG is clearly shown as being the original site for it or a link is provided to the GG report.

My thoughts are they should get permission before reposting another sites content, or the person who posted. This is IMO. I don't care if I get reposted but ask me first.