Forum Copyright - TOS Contradicts itself For one reason or another, I would like to delete content posted by me on a specific forum. There are two sections in the TOS that both contradict themselves, which is why I am asking for advice here. The first section that appears on the topic: PROPRIETARY RIGHTS. "[Forum] does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, works of authorship, applications, or other materials (collectively, "Third Party Content") that its users post." However, the next sentence then says: "By posting Third Party Content to any public area of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant to [Forum] an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute said Content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, said Third Party Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses (through multiple tiers) of the foregoing." From my (Very uneducated) understanding, this means that I am still the copyright holder of the (unique) content that I have posted, but the forum has the full rights to display the content, which is a right I cannot revoke. If I'm the owner of the content, surely I have the right to request its deletion? When I asked, they said no, however, I'm 100% sure that there's a very fast way to remove all posts at once. This isn't really a big deal, I was just interested in learning a little more about the situation. (Both I and the registered company are located in the UK) Thanks
The part about "If I'm the owner of the content, surely I have the right to request its deletion" is the problem. Sure, you have the right to request, but you can't legally compel. You have an agreement with them, according to which you got something, and they got something. You can't then take back the thing that you gave them, which is permission to use. You didn't give them the IP itself, which you still hold. Here's an analogy. You may own a car, and can give a person permission to use the car (let's say "if you bring me back a pound of cheese from the store"). You cannot later change your mind (especially after you've gotten the cheese) a say that you retract that permission and therefore they actually stole your car. When permission to use is given, as long as the conditions for granting permission are satisfied, you can't un-give permission.
Their code, their rules A copyright holder is free to offer their work under none, one or many licences. They can, at the same time, use their own work however they see fit without regard to the licences they have given/sold to others (except, they can only give one person an exclusive licence). As an analogy, let’s say I own a fleet of cars. I can drive my cars anytime I want. I can let Jim drive my cars anytime he wants for free. I can let Mary drive a specific car on Thursdays and only within 10km of the depot. I can let Joe drive my cars providing he pays me $50 a day. And I’m not going to let Fred drive them at all because Fred’s a jerk. Each of those is a different licence.
It's not clear exactly what you're asking, when you say "the company I work for" – i.e. are you asking "can they fire me?" (almost certainly they can, even if their TOS thinking is legally misguided – unless in your country there are laws that prevent firing employees). To be certain, you need to hire an attorney who is sufficiently savvy about web page technology that they can accurately judge what you are doing, and whether you can fruitfully resist their demands. You seem to be skeptical of their position because you are "not affecting their servers in any way". The TOS is not about affecting their servers, it is about affecting their intellectual property. It appears that your code does a number of the prohibited actions such as and perhaps most importantly "modify". If you have distributed a program that allows users to modify company content on their own computers, then the user might be in violation of the TOS, but not you (since you're not running a server that redistributes). However, I am betting that in order to create and test the program you had to violate the TOS. Additionally, you could be vicariously liable for the infringements of others, especially if this program can only be used to infringe on copyright, and you know this fact. That is pretty much the end of the legal part. As for how you should respond, your attorney, and not Law SE, deals in recommendations.
Don't get hung up on unauthorized resale. That only prohibits unauthorized resale. Authorized resale is ok. From http://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-1854-copyright-infringement-first-sale-doctrine: The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. The right to distribute ends, however, once the owner has sold that particular copy. See 17 U.S.C. § 109(a) &amp; (c). Since the first sale doctrine never protects a defendant who makes unauthorized reproductions of a copyrighted work, the first sale doctrine cannot be a successful defense in cases that allege infringing reproduction.
You are asking the wrong question. It should be: When you have downloaded the content and metadata, what are you allowed to do with it and what is forbidden? Somebody owns the copyright to the text and images in the thumbnail. This could be the operator of the third party website, or that site has licensed the content from yet another party. You haven't licensed it from anybody. So you can watch the content in accordance with the TOS, and your computer can evaluate the metadata to do it, but you cannot display it on your own site. Details will differ between jurisdictions, of course. You might also be held responsible for illegal content in the thumb you generate. Follow-up: There seems to be some question of what 'thumbnail' and 'card' mean in this context. This answer assumes a somewhat scaled-down representation of the content of the entire page, not just a collection of actual metadata like content length and expiry.
One big hole in any scheme that relies on copyright is that it could not preclude people talking about the previous content or talking about you. This is well established First Amendment law. For example, see Near v. Minnesota 283 U.S. 697 (1931), which holds that except in rare judicially established exceptions (relating to military information, obscenity, and inciting acts of violence), government censorship is unconstitutional. Thus, no statutory scheme could be used to prevent third parties who happened to have seen the material while it was freely available from re-iterating what they had seen, or talking about it, or talking about the author (you). People could even reproduce portions of the published content. Some types of reproduction would be protected as fair use in the US, especially if the reproduction is for the purpose of criticism. (17 USC 107, and this previous Law.SE answer) The closest approach would be to protect your work as trade secret, making sure that anyone that you share it with agrees to non-disclosure. But, if you "publish unique content under this pseudonym" there is no way to "arbitrarily or wholly revoke discussion about that content". If the cat gets out of the bag, while you may have remedies against the person who violated the non-disclosure agreement, you would not be able to prevent third-party discussion or reproduction.
You are not supposed to "explain" anything. See this site: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-takedown-notice-targeting-your-content What you have to do is to state, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief that your material was wrongly removed. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Google (or whoever the host is) doesn't care and shouldn't care about the actual copyright situation, only whether you supplied a counter notice where you state that your material was wrongly removed. Now Google should reinstate your app (however, since nobody can force them to host your app at all, I suspect they can remove it at any time for any reason), and whoever put in the DMCA claim can then go and sue you for copyright infringement. If they do, you can use as a defence that they could have and should have a DMCA notice to you. The whole DMCA is about your host, here: Google, to remove itself from any copyright infringement case. By following the rules for a proper notice and proper counter notice, they achieve that. And then the matter is between the complainant and you.
This sounds completely incorrect to me. First, subsequent research is not normally a "derivative work" for the purpose of copyright, since copyright doesn't protect your ideas but only the particular form in which you have expressed those ideas. Second, as the owner of the copyright, you can permit anyone to make any sort of copy or derivative work, or sell, assign, or license the ability to do so to other parties, without regard to whether the work has been published. The real reason that nonpublication of your work would stifle further research is that researchers will not have access to it.