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Originally Posted by azazel1024
You could probably dig through case law and copyright law and figure out just how large a written work needs to be to be considered copyright.
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Haiku are 17 syllables long, and a single haiku is copyrighted when it's written.
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One other thing to consider though is that public comments don't necessarily fall under copyright automatically (and might not be copyrightable). So something posted to a website as a "public" comment may also not necessarily automatically fall under copyright protection.
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Unless the forum has specific rules that comments made at it are devoid of copyright, they're copyrighted. If you write your masterpiece novel in someone else's notebook, you still own copyright on the novel.
Most internet forums are not "public"--they're viewable by the public, but posting is limited to members. If you draw a picture on the wall of a pub with permission of the owners, and anyone who looks in the window can see it, the pub owner still can't copy it--and certainly, the people who look in the window can't take a photo of it & sell t-shirts of the photo.
Right now, every comment, email, tweet, blog post and LOLCAT picture is copyrighted. While many forums have requirements that allow the owners to copy/distribute the content at will, that's not the same as allowing anyone who reads it, the right to redistribute it.
[quote]That aside, even if it did fall under copyright protection, you then get in to the various issues of fair use and copyright law for how the posts/comments are being used and how profit is being derived from them [quote]
"Cutting into profits" isn't required to prove infringement. If the works are unregistered (as these mostly are), then one can only sue for damages, not punitive amounts--but the infringement itself is still occurring, and be subject to whatever other legal penalties the gov't wants to inflict on infringers.
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Next you also have the issue of, do the forum operators KNOW that the copyright infringing activity is occuring and are doing nothing about it and/or don't do anything if notified.
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The forum owners here certainly allow news articles to be quoted without specific consent. They are, presumably, thinking that the amount that's copied is within the range of fair use/fair dealing. (I'm not sure what Canada has that's equivalent.) However, if a ruling found them wrong about that, there'd be years of evidence that they have infringed copyright--not willful infringement, which carries a bigger penalty, but "I didn't know that would be infringing" is like "I didn't realize that book's not in the public domain anymore;" it provides protection against the amount of a ruling; it's not defense against being sued.