Copyright and This Forum

[Bluepaint]

Actually HTLAL had some guidelines that FX laid down in the early days. No text speech such as 'lol' or 'btw' as he wasn't keen on the forum being a place for general chit chat and also because he wanted us to remember that not everyone was a native anglophone. Little to no smileys/emoticons. Only quote what you need to, don't quote for the sake of it or quote an entire post. And try to avoid posting for very short replies and one liners such as "I agree" or "yes".

I was thinking the other day how much more informal this place is. I don't mind either way if we are formal or informal, it's just funny that some of the things people are talking about in this thread are things that FX originally requested us to (not) do.

I don't mind who wishes to be formal and who wishes to be informal (<<<< guess my preferred style today) and I think a scattering of text/online speech could be good as those who are learning English are going to come across it one way or another! But I did like his guidelines on quotes and he had a point about one-liners. I find when they are the norm then I post a lot of pointless one line replies. Sometimes, however, you do just want to voice your agreement with a simple "yep".

[zenmonkey]

Actually HTLAL had some guidelines that FX laid down in the early days...

Who?
Yes, I mentioned those guidelines - and they made sense in that time and place. It's been a lifetime, in Internet years, and a lot has evolved. I think that it makes sense to generally try to write for clarity and keep acronyms and shortcuts reasonably limited. On the other hand, the site is accessible from a variety of mobile devices not attached to a keyboard and some flexibility and informality will occur.

By the way, on almost any machine you can have shortcuts typed replaced automatically. All my BTW are normally auto-expanded like the beginning of this paragraph. I actually need to block the shortcut to just have the 3 letters.

[Bluepaint]

Oh I'm with you Zenmonkey, things have most certainly evolved and I'm not saying we should go back to how things were. Personally I like the change, the change being that we have choice in our writing style. I just fancied adding some more background to the subject

[Takra jenai]

Formal, informal. Makes me laugh. It's easy for native speakers. I use my own variety of interlanguage. I'm never sure of anything.
It's frightening how English dominates. Everything, everywhere.

[tangleweeds]

One thing that needs to be fixed is to make it so that quoting a post with a quote in it only quotes the post, not the quote in the post. It didn't do that on the old htlal right? And it seems lots of people are trying to get rid of the quote-within-a-quote but messing it up. I almost did it in this post.

I think quote within a quote is very useful, especially when a long thread diverges topics within itself. Just use Preview to see if you broke your tags, then repair them as necessary.

[Michel1020]

I stop reading at page 4 - sorry guys - no time.

By the way - reading my post you aggree that I am god and own all rights on your life and anything related to it. You are now in debt with me at the rate of one satoshi for every occurrence of my words. I reserve the right to change this rate without any warning.

Seriously - are you so sure what you write or say here or elsewhere has never been written or said before by others or even by yourself. Are you sure you have the rights to requote even yourself ?

If you don't want your words and ideas to be requoted, reused or whatever - don't share any idea or word.

[Polyclod]

I stop reading at page 4 - sorry guys - no time.

No no, that's cool, we get it. It's summer holidays man, people are busy, can't be bothered answering every fax and checking your AOL mail every week. I'm just surprised you were able to get to a cyber cafe/public library while on vacation! That's not easy to do in 1998, which is what year it currently is./s

[kanewai]

I've read a couple times that FX holds the copyright to the content on HTLAL. But I wonder: is this something that we all just assume to be true, or is it specifically stated somewhere? I've looked, and I've found nothing.

My understanding of social media is that the default is: the site owner owns the distribution rights to all content - so they can post it elsewhere, use it in advertisements, incorporate it into a book, etc. However, the original author still holds the actual copyright to any content that they submitted unless they have specifically signed it away.

Meaning: I can't import anyone else's posts here, but I can certainly carry over my own log.

[daegga]

You can read the specific terms on the registration page. They agree more or less with your assumption.

[Iversen]

There is a long text about Swiss copyright legislation here.