Erlang forums (was Re: PING TEST)

[Contact | Erlang Forums]

Those apply to "erlangforums.com <http://erlangforums.com/> content" i.e the content of which the copyright resides with the forum. So things like the name, logo, design, conversations/threads as a whole, etc. This means those things cannot be reproduced elsewhere and this protects us from things like web-scrapers who download/copy forum content and reproduce it under different domains passing it off as their own (in other words where they steal forum content). This is how we protect the forum and everyone's conversations on it.

You may be conflating this with the intellectual property of individual users and as mentioned in my previous post this is not something we try (or want to) to take ownership of - the copyright of everyone's posts/code always belongs to them, and your use of their code snippets posted on the forum depends on the context of each individual thread the person posted them in. 

Ultimately there are numerous ways in which such a forum can be set up, but I am confident what we have is fair. We don't want to force people to hand over the copyright of their intellectual property and we don't want to force everyone to post everything under some sort of Creative Commons type licence because the forum is much more than a Q&A platform. It will include threads about people's personal experiences and many of us would not want things like that appearing all over the web, possibly edited or taken out of context - that's what something like Creative Commons would allow.

I hope that helps, but the short of it is your use of other people's code depends on the context of the thread people post in - and our focus is to allow people to decide for themselves where or how they post.

/Aston

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My previous response (copied below) isn't showing as I had '+ml' in the email address - I've removed that now so hopefully this one will go through ok! (Apologies to Scott for receiving this message multiple times!)

> Personally, I prefer the forum over the email format. And I have no problems with the attempts to promote inclusivity.

That's great to hear Scott :-)

> If you follow the agreement strictly: ask a question about programming in Erlang, get a helpful line of code from a member, you are now forbidden from using that code in any actual product you might be working on.

This is not the case. Code use is based on context and intent. So if somebody posts a code snippet in a thread where someone is asking a question about how to do something, they are, by contributing to the thread, implicitly stating that that person (or anyone reading the thread in future) may use that code in the context of the thread that they posted their snippet in (otherwise they wouldn't have contributed to it).

However if you mean can you take someone's snippet or anything else they've written in a post from anywhere on the forum and then sell it as you own (in other words plagiarise someone's work) then of course that would not be permissible. Unless of course the thread starter specifically stated their intention and people could then decide whether they want to contribute to such a thread (and if they do, on what conditions they want to and how they should go about it depending on their personal circumstances - most countries require a written/signed contract to do things like transfer copyright for instance) and so this would be between those specific users and if it involves things like transfer of ownership then they would most likely take that conversation off-forum. So in short, we let everyone decide how or when they take part in a thread depending on the context of each individual thread. We feel this is fair and reasonable and what most people would expect on a platform like this. There are more details about this in our FAQs: https://erlangforums.com/faq#ip <https://erlangforums.com/faq#ip>

/Aston

> On 15 Dec 2021, at 17:53, Scott Ribe <scott_ribe@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>> On Dec 15, 2021, at 10:27 AM, Contact | Erlang Forums <contact@REDACTED> wrote:
>> 
>> This is not the case. Code use is based on context and intent. So if somebody posts a code snippet in a thread where someone is asking a question about how to do something, they are, by contributing to the thread, implicitly stating that that person (or anyone reading the thread in future) may use that code in the context of the thread that they posted their snippet in (otherwise they wouldn't have contributed to it).
> 
> While I imagine this is the INTENT, the ToS restrictions go well beyond:
> 
> "You may not adapt, alter or create a derivative work from any erlangforums.com content except for your own personal, non-commercial use."
> 
> "You may not copy, reproduce, republish, post, broadcast, download, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use erlangforums.com content in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use."
> 
> Restrictions on republishing, posting, broadcasting are understandable. But we may not download nor "otherwise use"? Really???
> 
> 

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