Taking this and the fact that the site is a “financial investment” into consideration, Skylight will almost positively have you in legal trouble in order to protect his investment.

The easiest way around this would probably have a petition where members can sign up to allow their work to be published, or having them do the new re-posting themselves. Ultimately, i think that making an entire new “Tau Online” would be foolish. It would be easier and safer to move to Advanced Tau Tactica which is an already established Tau forum. This would provide a much greater support base to protect you from any legal problems, and since many users from Tau Online already are on ATT, it would be a smooth transfer, and easier to get knowledge about the shift to the masses.

Database ownership laws in the EU, say the creator has ownership of the database. It would seem that this Skylight didn’t create this database at all, and so the creator of it (presumably the other admins and members) would have ownership rights to it. It would get very murky especially with international law crossovers causing all sorts of problems, but I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you suggest Jezlad

“All pages, content, forum posts and other media on Tau Online are copyrighted to Tau Online and their corresponding authors in so far as this does not conflict with any existing trademarks, copyrights, intellectual property and/or patents.”

meaning that individuals still have copyright to thier work, but not anyone elses.

then there is this

“Copying, reproducing or duplicating any parts of this website is not allowed without express permission from Tau Online. If you wish to use any of our content, please e-mail ftyross@tauonline.org for permission. This copyright notice isn’t against fair use; we only ask that you quote no more than two, 7 line paragraphs, and that you give credit to this website and its author for its use. If you wish to quote anything more, please get permission to do so from the above e-mail address.”

which would mean taking the database and posting it will probably get you into legal trouble.

My theory would be that you will need to get individual users permission to re-post stuff, and therefore cannot just re-post the whole database.

On another note, why not just join with Advanced Tau Tactica instead of creating a whole new forum. I know that many users from Tau online are already there.

The law will be on you faster than flies to a cow crap mate. One email to your host and they'll pull the hosting from beneath you.

You simply can't duplicate a database you don't own, every word in that file belongs to the owner of the server it was stolen from… ie – Skylight (sorry to say it).