When the LFPF was first established, the issue of who owns the copyright for postings on forums was being hotly debated. Some sites claimed that the site "owned" the material posted, and essentially could do whatever they wished with it. Thus, the decision was made to attempt to clarify the matter on the LFPF, indicating that the poster owned the copyright to anything they posted, and that the poster gave the LFPF a revocable license to display it within the forum.

While we are still of the mind that we do not claim "ownership" of posts made by our members, the revocable license aspect has come back to bite us. In a couple of cases, dissatisfied parties to transactions originated out of the For Sale/Wanted sub-forum have requested that all of their posts and threads be deleted - essentially hiding the transaction problem. In truth, this doesn't accomplish much, since the forum content is picked up by search engines and external archive sites, but it is a tedious and lengthy process to delete hundreds or even thousands of posts.

As a result, we are considering changing the terms of use to making the license to maintain and display posts irrevocable. In other words, like everything else about the Internet, once you post it, it's out there forever, and the forum moderators are not obliged to remove it.

But, we would appreciate member input prior to making the change.