I have a website that is hobby related. There is a lot of good information about the hobby on the net but more and more some of the older articles/projects/information become lost as personal websites and/or old websites vanish. One of the "missions" of my site is to preserve this older information. I never reproduce content without asking the author for permission first as well as properly crediting and linking to them. My question is what to do when I find older content from personal pages or old EDU student pages, etc. In many cases I have no way to contact the author to ask permission. If I have exhausted all efforts to contact an author is it ethical/legal to use the content if I provide a link to the original web page as well as properly credit the author? Any advice would be appreciated.
From a legal stand point you can't publish the content without the owners permission. In reality I don't think anyone would make a big fuss about it. Especially if it's a hobby type subject and you gave the author credit for it. The worst that would happen is that someone will contact you and demand that you remove it. I think most people would be amused if they found a old article they wrote in college still floating around.