I hate to say it, but I feel I have learned more here about specific fruit and their growing habits then I would have having attended my states AG school for orcharding. I say that as someone whom attended university for fish ecology (field work) and fish pathology ( lab work). The level of knowledge passed around here is top notch and well above hobbyist level.
I speak to university representatives all the time at the state fair and sign up often for their workshops about growing in my local community. Their knowledge and incite is far behind the regulars on this forum that teach us so much.
I have nothing but thanks and warmness for this gem of a site. Top notch indeed.
This forum is a Godsend, which is why, when Scott asks for funds, I send some.
Several years ago I posed the question whether it might be worthwhile trying GoldRush. People came through with data & experience that convinced me to try. Now GoldRush is one of my favorite apples!
Thank you all for your contribution to my learning & good eating.
Everytime I turn around more and more websites I use have turned into pay models. I donāt mind purchasing something with a one time payment, but Iāll be damned if I want a dozen/dozens of monthly payments for websites that all used to be free.
Not gonna happen, a one time payment or by donation is fine by me. I am averse to being a renter, which is more and more becoming the norm these days.
This forum is fantastic, and worth far more than the couple of donations Iāve put towards Scottās forum in the last year. Hereās to the best gardening forum on the Internet.
I agree with all the positive sentiments expressed.
I have infrequently posted to technical forums on computing and have never gotten a useful response and usually very aggressive/hostile responses from contributors who seem mainly interested in gaining reply āpointsā.
I am very appreciative of the help I have received over the last couple years!
I agree with you, Steven. I refer my friends and family to this site when they ask questions that I canāt answer. Green forum for gardening and orcharding info.
Iām new here. Found it looking for info on cold hardy persimmons. Ive been growing close to 50 trees since 2008. Many varieties of fruit. Iāve been on lots of forums over the years, this one does look to be a top end forum for fruit trees.
Welcome to the best site for advice on all aspects of gardening and growing fruit. I have been on this site for a number of years and find so much reliable information from soil to the end product you name the subject and find it here!
Dennis
Kent, wa
The forum is unique because it has been designed not for profits, rather for the best interest of its members. Many of us are growing fruit to make our lives and the lives of others better. Those that come after us will be 10x better than we ever were at growing fruit because they are starting out in the place we struggled to get to. @scottfsmith has a love of fruit growing like we all share. Collectively this is hands down the best fruit growers ever assembled in one group.
Seriously though, does Scott own the content of this forum? If I was to take comments Iāve written on this forum and used them in a garden book would I be in violation of his automatic copyright to them?
Iām not planning on writing a book and if I was I trust Scotts ethnical nature, but Iām still curious. I have written a bookās work of comments on fruit growing, and then some, in my posts here.
By default, as the creator of the content, you hold the copyright to your own content and can reproduce your own content in your book.
To the extent that growingfruit.org has any intellectual property interest in your posts here, it is likely only to the extent that you cannot sue the site for reproducing your posts and publishing them here, which you (at least implicitly) have agreed to by using the site. It would be odd if you were surrendering your right to reproduce your own work.
There are several good books-worth of material on this site. You could break them down by plant species, by hardiness, by skill (grafting, pruning, etc.) and so on. You could have a book on merchandising, perhaps. There are posters who are expert on putting up their harvests.
I wonāt claim to know copyright law but it would not surprise me to learn that by publishing here without claiming copyright your comments enter the public domain.
I am also not a copyright expert, but I think itās unlikely that the posts here are in the public domain without an explicit relinquishment of rights by the content creator.
To put it this way, suppose I create a book titled The Definitive Curated Collection of the Posts of @alan on the Growing Fruit Forum and start selling it on Amazon, keeping the profits for myself. I think itās quite likely that I would be liable to @alan for copyright infringement.
I suspect I would be facing a rather steep uphill legal battle if, for my defense, I were relying on the notion that @alan had implicitly relinquished his copyright just by posting on a forum.
From the US Copyright Office. " Although a website may contain text, artwork, photographs, music, videos, or other copyrightable content, the website itself is not typically considered a copyrightable work .
Before 1 March 1989, in the US, works could be easily given into the public domain by just releasing it without an explicit copyright notice. With the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 (and the earlier Copyright Act of 1976, which went into effect in 1978), all works were by default copyright protected and needed to be actively given into public domain by a waiver statement/anti-copyright can call notice.[49][50] Not all legal systems have processes for reliably donating works to the public domain, e.g. civil law of continental Europe.[citation needed] This may even āeffectively prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rightsā.[51]
So it appears that we do have some copyright protection even though weāve published our work by putting here.
Some of my comments have been previously published in print mediaā¦but as the author I tell them author retains rights to all his materials even though they put the article in a periodical that says all contents copywrited.
So, in such case, the oldest date in print has the legal high ground if thereās not a binding exclusive agreement entered into.
Just one more reason to use pseudonymns if youāre concerned about trouble later on though.
