Apparently the forum owners are not concerned about the storage space occupied by the forum. When I suggested that I thought it would be a good idea to remove all of my previous posts dating from the first days of the forum and only retain posts (my posts, anyway) for a month or so, the forum owners didn't jump at the chance. I'd have done it myself already but we haven't quite got that process figured out yet although we're working on it.
It's the photos that take up the space and I've posted a lot of them over the years. I've not kept track but I'm guessing they occupy a fair number of gigs on the forum server. So it'd be good to get them off, I think.
Someone mentioned awhile back that they thought that when we post somehting to the forum that material becomes the property of the forum owners. That may be true of the text but it's not true of the photos. The copyright of a photo belongs to the photographer unless the photographer signs the rights away in a buy-out contract. Interestingly this is not true of video.
When we (Boeing) hire an outside air-to-air photography specialist to shoot a project for us, if we want to buy the rights in perpetuity to his photographs the buy-out generally runs $10,000 to $15,000.
So post away, Mark, and if any of your photos show up on any other forum or in a publication or on a website and you did not authorize their use in this way, you can collect whatever you can collect. Might even get you that Nordhavn you've always wanted.
A Seattle magazine used one of my floatplane photos on their cover a number of years ago without my permission. They weren't trying to get away with anything, they simply hadn't been told who took the photo. As the magazine had already been published I pretty much had them over a barrel. I told them my price for their use of the photo and they paid it without argument. The timing was perfect--- part of their payment paid for our new Rocna which back in those days was just shy of $1,000.
