Folks, we are not talking about highly secretive material and such here. We are talking about technical and non-technical information about audio and video.
Irrespective of the contents, we will evolve a way by which the material, once posted, cannot be removed.
Cheers
Venkat, firstly a big thanks for doing a absolutely great job in this really difficult and thankless role.
I'm not sure if you are referring to the copyright issue here, but I want to clarify that many posts are not just about sharing facts and figures but also about sharing insights and giving detailed explanations based on years of study and research. Many people nowadays make money out of this by creating personal blogs and making a name for themselves and/or just from Google ad traffic in their blog. Many other people, on the other hand, do this purely altruistically in this forum as they feel a sense of community in this forum.
If the copyright restriction means that they throw away their knowledge to another entity when they can't even retain the copyright of their own writings, this forum will eventually end up being a source of only information - namely facts, figures, and price quotations, not knowledge and wisdom.
To give you an example of what I'm talking about, some members in another forum developed a technique based on years of experimenting with fullrange drivers to improve the acoustic characteristics of the drivers with some homebrew mods. They freely talk about the technique in the forum, and guide others on how to do it. However, they also wrote white papers on the technique and created a patent, and now run a commercial enterprise where they modify drivers and sell it for a profit to others. If the forum legally takes away the copyright of everything they posted over the years, and let them not even keep their own copyright, they would have taken all their discussions on specific techniques offline.
Another good example is speaker cabinet designs, many of which are available for free in various forums, many others which are commercial, and many of which are both free and commercial, where you can build the design yourself or buy a flatpack or fully made cabinet from the designer. The forum can retain co-ownership of content, but you have to let people keep copyright ownership of their own content as well.
Please, I am only saying this with the best interest of the forum at heart. I would like to see this forum become a singular source of good knowledge and information for people interested in this field.
hyeah:
