To wonder if mumsnet could up their security?

[DragonMummy1418]

Threads are constantly being stolen for newspaper articles and TV.

Surely there is some clause mumsnet could add into their policy about papers being liable & sued if they take the stories?

Anyone agree / know more about the law surrounding this?

I'm sure mumsnet like the free advertising.

Public forum cock. Nowt you can do.

This has been discussed about a bazillion times. Basically you post on MN you're posting on an open forum. The story stealers are not breaking any rules or laws and there's absolutely no action that can be taken against them

It's extremely short sighted of MN because ultimately, the site will fail. Or if not fail, it will become much, much less popular and lose the appeal it's had for years as a safe space to talk anonymously.

Look at how many threads are started and then deleted because "the OP has asked us to take it down due to privacy concerns". I don't blame them! But it means half the threads that are started - and usually the juicy ones - get pulled so there's no conclusion/opportunity to follow which is bloody annoying and goes against the whole spirit of the site! Plus, MN cannot possibly need any more exposure through sites like The One Who Shall Not Be Named so I suspect that any benefit it might have had is now obsolete.

MN will fail, and when it does, it will only have itself to blame.

OK, I'm dismounting from my high horse now

I thought similar a while back. I naively thought that it was the big bad journos and why wasn’t the higher ups doing more?

The fact is that at the very least it’s free advertising/clicks for both MN and the paper. There’s also the fact that many of the stories (not all, but many) are deliberately started to end up online. It’s not going to change, especially when it helps revenues.

They love the advertising.

"Surely there is some clause mumsnet could add into their policy about papers being liable & sued if they take the stories?"

No. That isn't how the law works. Sued for what exactly?

"Surely there is some clause mumsnet could add into their policy about papers being liable & sued if they take the stories?"

Liable for what? Sued for what? Theft? This is all public, newspapers are allowed to report on things that happen in public.

I don't know exactly...
Property theft?
Copyrights laws?

If MNHQ made it clear in their T&C's that every thread legally belongs to the original author...?

I haven't seen any newspaper just blatantly copying a thread and claiming it's their own original work.

It's usually something like "A poster on Mumsnet revealed that her MIL blah blah blah". They're just 'reporting' about things that have happened, nothing illegal about that.

If MNHQ made it clear in their T&C's that every thread legally belongs to the original author...?

They won’t, you really need to understand that it works in the favour of MN as a business for the online media to be talking about their forum.

It’s not property theft either. Imagine you told a friend ‘I’m fed up of my husband, I think I’m going to leave him’ - if she then told everybody ‘Dragon is fed up of her husband and is thinking of leaving him’, you couldn’t sue her, could you. You made that public knowledge, and you cannot then control where that information goes without having serious legal contracts in place. Of course, you may then decide never to tell your friend anything ever again, understandably. Just think of MN as your untrustworthy, gobshite friend.

@EdmundCleverClogs

"Just think of MN as your untrustworthy, gobshite friend."

Incredibly apt.

If MNHQ made it clear in their T&C's that every thread legally belongs to the original author...?

MN cant just unilaterally assert rules and expect others to comply.

You might agree to Ts&Cs but others who haven't signed up to them aren't bound by them.

I should stop being surprised that people still have no clue how it works

If a product you use is free, you are the product

I think If you Willingly choose to pour out all your thoughts and feelings into a public forum/social media, you can hardly claim ‘intellectual rights’ to your comments and thoughts, naturally interesting stuff will be picked up by the wider media (e.g daily mail et al) so do as many others do when they know their story could be controversial, then change their user name and remove possibility of identification xxx