[Marco van Herwaarden]

You are raising a lot of legal questions here. As i am not a lawyer (and law can vary among countries) i will not reply to those.

There is 1 thing i would like to add something to though:

In my mind and from everything I have read, the owner of the site is ultimately resposible for the content of the site. Also, as I understand it, the owner of the site can do what they wish with the site content. The opinion expressed in a post will always belong to the poster, but the typed content posted belongs to the site owner.

First of all this will again vary according to your local laws and your TOS.

You are however also raising something that most of us never give a second thought: How to handle content that you don't allow/want on your site.

A lot of times this is simple, someone makes for example a spam post and you delete the post. Nothing wrong with this, and you might even be forced by law to delete some content (for example if someone posted nude child pictures).

The dillema however starts if a post is partially against your rules. Deleting the whole post might not be needed or even put your members up against you. Editing the post or removing part of it however changes the opinion he wants to be posted. From a legal P.O.V. you might be wrong by editing, as you are manipulating a message that is 'copyrighted' / 'intelectual property' of the original poster.

So question is (and as i am not a lawyer i can not provide an answer) what should you do from a legal POV: Edit out unwanted parts of a post or only accept the whole message or nothing from it (ie. delete post).