Poems from me

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

...and it describes in legalese what happens on this site when someone posts, or replies to a posting. In its simplest terms it says:

"Okay, if you let me post here I give you and others the right to respond, to quote, or to use this posting to go off in another direction."

Broadly speaking this is a licensing agreement. As I read it, this licensing agreement grants the owner of XMTS the right to exploit the material on this site in any way he wants, without having to compensate the author of that material in any way, whatsoever. Nowhere does it state that if the owner of the XMTS site exploits the material covered by the license that he has to credit the original author-- indeed, it would seem that the site owner could "publish", in the broadest sense of the word, the work of the author and assume the copyright of that work in his name, not the original author's name.

The agreement also gives the author the right to exploit the material he has created and posted on the site in any manner he may want. The difficulty being, in the instance of commercially valuable material, that very few "publishers" are going to be willing to invest in bringing the material to the public knowing that there is another commercial entity (the owner of the site) waiting in the wings to execute their freehold on the property and publish a virtually identical work.

This has already happened in the area of science fiction and fantasy. A fairly well known author wrote a series of inter-related short stories for a privately owned web site. Later, she decided to publish these in anthology form. Her usual publisher was approached and he thought it was a good idea. Unfortunately, the web site owner had previously cut a deal with a different publisher to publish the stories as a novel. She did this by creating some new material and carefully editing the short stories into a seamless narrative.

So, is this likely to happen on X MARKS THE SCOT? Probably not-- the site owner, Steve Ashton, is an honest and honorable man. But, if you are concerned about the possibility of of being "ripped off", then you have two obvious choices:

1) Notify the site owner of your concerns and come to an agreement over how he may, or may not, exploit your work beyond the electronic medium of this site.

2) Don't post anything you don't want to appear elsewhere in some other form.