[wp-forums] Giving WordPress.org permission to publish information publicly

[Otto]

On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 11:59 AM, andrew nevins
<andrew.nevins.misc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does WordPress.org forums have to get permission from people to publish
> their forum posts publicly?
>
> Or is the act of that the person sharing information on the public
> WordPress.org forum the equivalent of granting WordPress.org permission to
> post that information publicly?
>
> http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-delete-posts?replies=10

Just to prevent everybody from running with it, no, there is no
explicit permission needed to reproduce material on forums. When you
submit a creative work (a post, a comment, etc) to somewhere, by the
act of doing that, you grant them implicit permission to reproduce
that work for the purposes of displaying it. That is, after all, why
you submitted it. Otherwise, you lead to the nonsense situation of
having the ability to post on a forum and then sue the forum for
violation of your copyright by actually showing the post you submitted
to them.

Second, we don't edit or delete material when people complain about
Google's indexing of our forums because once we start down that path,
it is unending. If somebody doesn't want something public, don't post
it in a public form. You can delete real names, phone numbers, email
address, other personally identifying info, sure. But links to
websites? Ridiculous.

Finally, I looked at the thread he's actually complaining about, and
for the life of me, I cannot see his "company name" or site name
anywhere. There's nothing to delete.
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/issue-with-google-snippets

-Otto