deleting own posts question

As we've stated in a few other threads here and there, we are not going to be removing any content you may have posted prior to this point, or any other point.

If you do not wish to grant any rights to photographic content, simply remove it.

If you do not wish to grant rights to anything you may post in the future, do not post it.

(Not picking on Vive, or anything -- just trying to make a broader point):

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding regarding what users are doing when they post work on Tribe and other Internet-based services.

Under the common law, the creator of an original artistic work owns certain rights to prevent others from reproducing that work. That part seems relatively well understood. HOWEVER, what appears to be misunderstood by a lot of folks is that those rights can be surrendered through certain actions, regardless of whether the actor's intent is to surrender rights.

An important action that can surrender some rights is distribution of a copy of the work to another. Such distribution is considered to be accompanied by a grant of certain rights corresponding to the distribution, even in the absence of an explicit license grant. In the context of an Internet service, public posting of a work on the service's site would likely be construed by a court as a grant from the creator to the service of a license to store and display the work, at least for the normal purposes of the service.

As an example, posting a work to a thread in a tribe on Tribe.net would likely be construed as a license for Tribe.net to store and display whatever copies of the work correspond to normal copies of a post in a thread. That would likely include the right to display the post in the thread for so long as the thread endures (either as an active thread or an archived one), to cross-index the post (e.g., in the "My recent activity" section of the poster's profile), and to display other posts that quote the post in whole or in part. There are good arguments that the license would also extend to foreseeable improvements or expansions to Tribe.net (e.g., to indexing threads or making posts searchable).

I can't recall whether Tribe's former TOU made this clear (the new one does, anyway). Whether or not it did is irrelevant, though. Absent some explicit indication that stuff posted to Tribe could be withdrawn by the poster at will, a court would most likely consider that posters had no reasonable expectation that their rights in publicly posted material would be protected by Tribe beyond those protections recognized in the common law.

Whether we're talking about Tribe or some other public medium, anyone thinking of posting potentially valuable work should be careful not to give away rights they may want to enforce later.

Gary
(The good-looking-one, not the Tribe-employee-one :b )

Vive, if you can't get satisfaction any other way, one thing you might explore is DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). From Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA

Among other things, it requires companies that host online content to block access to it if they are asked to do so by the copyright holder.

Hopefully, Tribe will be willing to work with you without that, but it is available if you need it.

Tempest in a teapot

--S