Can Online forum owners sell Forum Threads/Posts?

[learner9]

Hi
Recently I came across a few articles regarding how to monetize your forum. One of the newest thing was to sell forum threads.
Can a forum owner do that? Can you sell forum threads? Is it legal in the US?
Thanks

[averagejoe7604]

The NSA is looking deeply into this. They fear that people who run websites might have a financial stake in them, and this sort of online commerce can bring the world to its knees. or maybe it's evading taxes. something.

a "forum" owner is the person who owns/runs a site. if they're making money on it in other ways, why not try a new and different way to make money? selling threads sounds odd, i had never heard of it before, but perhaps what they're doing is selling "content generation" which means whoever leases the thread is allowed to use whatever creative inspiration and/or quotes from the thread as they wish. if they're leasing it, they have the rights to the creative license generated there during their lease agreement. other people grabbing quotes from the thread and using them would then be infringing on those rights.

just an idea. what in your mind would make this ILLEGAL?