While I am not in the legal profession, I have had a paid position in a dead tree authors official fan association. One of the things we delt with was explaining to fans they had to sign a release before they gave any suggestions to the author or they would be returned unread. While for 98% of author's here this is extreme overkill, a simple disclaimer stating you give up monetary rights to your suggestions could save that .05% of author's here a future headache.
What headache?
Put simply, some people believe that ideas have value and will go after an author in court if they think that their idea was used in published material. Said case will lose, obviously, since copywrite only protects the unique expression of an idea in media, not the idea itself, but you still have to defend yourself which can be a long, stressful, and expensive process.
This has been an issue for a long time. J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was personally active in the show's usenet group back in 1995, but he asked mods to enforce a policy of nuking any post that included suggestions for future episodes. Wild speculation was fine, but he didn't want to deal with angry fans claiming that some future episode having idea A instead of idea B was because of fan popularity or something.
Terry Pratchett had a similar policy that was even more rigorously adhered to when he was on usenet. In his case it was even more of an issue because unlike JMS he didn't outline future books.
Anyone who doesn't bother to read a site's TOS (Terms of Service) deserves whatever they get as a result. It takes a while to parse the 'legalese', yet the whole point is to bore the readers to tears, long before they reach the most vital information for the users.
You get what you pay for, and when I don't pay for something, you have to ask what are you actually paying for it.
However, on SOL, Lazeez is very clear what his desires and his rules are. He makes no bones about it, and if you choose to violate them, then you can hardly bitch when he cracks down on it.
We all want to write whatever you want, yet you can't kick the person feeding you in the face if you expect to ever eat there again. Duh!
Not that this is directed at you, Wholf, yet it's a matter of you (that's the generic you) usually get precisely what's promised.
Forgive me... but I have absolutely no idea how anything you just wrote pertains to what OP asked for.
I get what OP is on about. I had more than one author here ask for an "Opinion", and then literally publish what I wrote, without any alterations, as part of the next chapter. No credit given. No mention of this not being their own words. Once, they even copy and pasted not just the example dialogue I wrote, but even my explanation for why I felt this would work better with a character that I had added in parentheses.
It honestly pisses me off when it happens, to the point where I now simply stopped giving opinions and reviews. I have also seen quite a few hot exchanges about shit like this. A clause in the TOS would allow an author to point at it and just shut the discussion up before it escalates.
I'm actually surprised (but glad...) that Laz hasn't kicked me out after my recent rant on a reader who posted (publicly) an opinion about one of my stories...
I was lucky enough to have readers suggest corrections to errors I made, and your point about crediting those readers made me think, "Oh, crap, I didn't publicly thank them at ALL back then!" Those readers (in my opinion) helped improve my stories, and I SHOULD have credited them somehow.
As for the reader who called me out with his nonsensical opinion, you get what you pay for, and if the story doesn't make you happy, go read something else...
I've done that, and Lazeez is fairly forgiving about such emotional responses. But, you can always 'request' that Lazeez remove such rants for everyone's benefit. He normally doesn't support that policy publicly, yet he knows such rants don't actually benefit anyone. So in those cases, it's better for everyone if they're just quietly swept under the rug and out of sight.
Not that it wasn't deserved, but once the point's been made, there's no point to harping on it, lest it becomes a life-long grudge on both sides.
It's just my background, as I learned long ago the value of reading the contractual details BEFORE agreeing to anything. It's something for too few do nowadays. It's yet another of my MANY preoccupations. Though in this case, it had to do with Lazeez's own stated policies and the MANY SOL authors who fragrantly violate those policy's and then bitch and moan when they're taken to task for purposely violating the policy.
That said, often a while you learn to guard your 'intellectual property' religiously, so while I often have an opinion of every topic imaginable, my story ideas or actual story suggests are MY personal property. I'll give suggestions, yet those aren't mine, as the author can either accept to reject them. Hence the term "suggestions".
It's just the flip side of the disgruntled fans, they bitch about something they adore because of a minor political slant which was never intended. It's putting the molehill higher than the mountain, leaving nothing whatsoever supporting the arguments.