The DMCA and 2001/29/EC open the door to more frivolous claims. Yet the problem is indeed more generic. User-contributed content should never be the belonging of a single company. Once published, it's public, and that should be it.

Some sites, like Stackoverflow (coincidentally a expert- sexchange competitor) publish all user content under a Creative Commons license. Albeit they impose extranous quirky terms, that's a good approach. It's however of no use if users don't look out for providers which do so.
Posting on Facebook et al is information lost in a walled garden (maybe a bad example due to content quality there).

So let's hope user awareness raises and the creative commons approach spreads. If web content is rightfully owned by the internet community at large, it would obviate content suppression and wrongful authorship claims.

Mr Gregg,

"...Experts Exchange are assuming copyright ownership of content that you, and I, and all their users create by asking and answering questions on their web site..."

Experts Exchange makes no such claim and never has.

However, since it has a vested interested and, because of how Google handles DMCA complaints, the alternative is for each person who owns the individual copyrights to file DMCA requests. Obviously, for a site that has been around since 1996, that's a high number of people to try to contact.

More to the point, allfaq.org has been stealing EE's content -- sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results -- for quite a while, and has been ducking Google's attempts to have its version of EE's content de-listed for at least six months. allfaq.org went so far as to show Google -- but nobody else -- 404 (Page Not Found) errors when a Google result was clicked. Indeed, Matt Cutts might have given Jeff Atwood credit (see www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/) for mentioning it as the catalyst for Google changing its algorithm -- but the facts are that Mr Atwood was way behind the curve on this one, and so is Mr Cutts, and so are you.

EE certainly has a vested interest in protecting its 3 million solutions; its business model is based entirely on providing a service and getting paid for it (as opposed to blowing millions of VC dollars on nice offices -- been there, done that). It has a vested interest in protecting the work of its contributors -- none of whom are paid, but all of whom still own their original work -- that predates the DMCA by a couple of years. That the DMCA was designed to protect the copyrights owned by big recording and movie companies isn't relevant; there's nothing in it preventing the protection of individuals who voluntarily try to help someone get a problem solved. Having a license to use the content provided does give EE standing, at least as far as Google is concerned.

That Google has now removed all of allfaq.org's results from their listings -- all 180,000 pages of them, with at least four different websites for each -- is evidence enough for me that Google takes the problem (and the DMCA complaint filed by EE) seriously. That their legal staff -- Google has more unfilled positions in its US legal department than EE has total employees -- has not objected to the DMCA complaint is further evidence Google thinks hit has merit. That they changed their algorithm to give priority to original sources is still further evidence.

As to asking their own members for help; why shouldn't they? EE has one office in a relatively small city on the California coast near a comparatively mediocre state university; it doesn't have immediate access to, nor the resources to attract, students from major universities in the Bay Area, let alone the rest of the world. But it does have access to nominally ten per cent of Microsoft's MVPs -- the best Microsoft users it can find -- on a daily basis. It does have access to some of the top Oracle and Java developers in the world. And it has access to a few people who know a lot more about SEO than most people whose paychecks don't come from Google. You could do a lot worse than trying to figure it out on your own; everyone should get by with a little help from their friends, right?

Mario,

Your logic -- at least as it applies to EE -- is faulty (and that probably also goes for stackoverflow.com as well) in that EE is a commercial venture; it always has been and always will be. That SO isn't profitable doesn't mean they don't want it to be; they've just prolonged the inevitable by taking someone else's money -- but eventually, those investors will want to see a return on investment (or the possibility of one) and the Creative Commons License will go out the window:

From the link at the bottom of this page:

You are free:
* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works
Under the following conditions:
* Attribution — You must give the original author credit.
* Non-Commercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

That seems pretty clear to me. The big difference: EE is honest about it.

Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Experts Exchange, but I do have a relationship with them that is beyond that of the normal member in that I am one of the volunteer site management personnel. I have been an EE member since 1999 and have little patience for assumptions made by people who do not ask for the accurate information first.

Dear Paul Gregg,

Interesting article about the copyright of the postings at Experts Exchange (EE).

I've been a contributing expert for 6 years and a moderator for 4 years, so I do know how things work at EE.

I've experienced the fact that my comments, without my permission , have been changed by the EE staff. As they did block my access to the site, I've lost all control over my (copyrighted) postings and would be interested to have all my 40.000 comment removed from EE.

Do you think this is possible ?

Regards,

nico5038

Thanks for your reply Paul.
I was already prepared for this disappointment, but hope others are warned not to post there to make the same mistake I did by contributing to a site that exploits their experts.

Regards,

Nic;o)