What does the following mean?

Powered by E-Blah Platinum 9.71B © 2001-2006  

Some fool copy & pasted all the posts on my board and created his own board with it. He pasted all the copied posts into his forum as a guest user.

After contacting him he claimed that the copyright notice refers to the forum software and not the forum posts and therefore he can use the posts as he like.

After pointing out to him that even with no copyright notice at all, content are still copyrighted and pointing him to this link:

http://www.whatiscopyright.org/

he removed all the posts.

Must I add another copyright notice above the Powered by E-Blah Platinum 9.71B © 2001-2006   or something like that to prevent similar incidents in future? Or does the © 2001-2006 also apply to the forum posts?

Powered by E-Blah Platinum 9.71B © 2001-2006  

This is indeed the copyright referring to the E-Blah code.

I believe if you have a copyright notice on your main site page then this will cover the contents of the whole site including the contents of the forum.

If you run a forum only then I would recommend a second copyright

I have a category for our acceptable use policy, and the copyright issues etc, initially it was to try to stop a "Competitor site" from nicking our news stories etc... I also have a copyright and legal disclaimer, and use policy on the front end of our site as well......

might be worth having a look at doing something similar

It says Powered by and not Copyright on the forum because the software that powers it is copyrighted 2001-2006.  It's to help clear any confusion like this, and forum admins SHOULD put their own copyright above this.

Thanks everyone.

I have now added a copyright to the forum, and on the main page some additional info.

Even without the copyright, I think it is kind of lame to just 'kick-start' your forum by copying the posts from another forum.

Anyway, I am happy it is sorted out.  

Trust me, it happens, and it used to happen a lot with our competitor site, we still have copying issues, but its now more what we do, and our ideas, as we are a proactive site, who meet in the real world, Motorcycle ride-outs we tend to find our tripideas, ride-outs, are copied.

For instance we have recently started videoing our ride-outs, and the webmaster of the other site, has posted "Just ordered a low res, battery operated bullet cam to SD card helmet cam. This will tie in nicely with the camcorder and laptop I'm
planning to take!" - So now our competitor site will be doing the same because we have something he doesn't. I find it all a bit trivial, but it is a very competitive area, especially as we do not get on in the slightest form, if you put us in the same room, it would end up a right mess LOL........

There isn't much I can do about the idea and activity copying, its difficult to keep him and his mates off the site, so i no longer bother, it takes too much time, and takes away from us doing what we do best......... ride-outs, and more of them than the competitor site LOL

Ya can view the vids here :

http://www.nukb.co.uk/ride-out%20videos.htm
If ya interested