Aconite said:
ideagirl, are you actually suggesting a writer illegally use someone else's intellectual property and just avoid being prosecuted for it? Because that's sleazy. Would you want someone to do that to your work?
I guess that did sound kind of sleazy, phrased that way. What I was trying to convey was that it is sometimes completely impossible to trace something back to its author when you found the thing on the internet. A lot of times, something on the web is the much-mangled end result of something else: person A might post something on a forum, then person B copies it into an email, rewrites it a little and forwards it to their friends, then one of their friends messes with it some more and posts it somewhere else, etc.... so by the time you get it, it's quite different than the thing that was originally posted, impossible to trace back.
So if googling it and trying again to contact the person who sent it lead the guy nowhere, if it is impossible to find the source but the material is so important to what he (she?) is writing that some form of it is really necessary, then it may be worth rewriting it to the point that it's basically unrecognizable. That may take it out of the realm of copyright--given that copyrights protect the expression of an idea, but not the idea itself (for a stupid example, you can't copyright the entire concept of napalm-breathing dragons from Mars, but you can copyright your particular story about a napalm-breathing dragon from Mars).
I dunno, maybe this still sounds sleazy, and in any case I wouldn't suggest it unless it was impossible to trace back AND the thing was somehow so crucial to what the person is writing that it HAS to be used. That's pretty unlikely, though. Most likely, all they need is one or two of the ideas in it... and that wouldn't raise a copyright issue. (It would still raise a plagiarism issue, but not a copyright issue; the plagiarism issue could be fixed by simply acknowledging that the ideas were not his/her own, but came from an anonymous posting on the internet).