Unless there was some stipulation in the sign-up form that people signed their copyrights over to vmag by posting, they don't own the copyrights. Even if there was such a stipulation, the chance that is binding is pretty small since no signatures were made. Although it has been a long, long time, I seem to remember the VX board migrating to vmag once upon a time. If that is correct, then I think it is reasonable to act as if postings before vmag, at vmag and here belong to the VX community at large.

I vote for a long, slow, suck off of vmag using one of the many free crawlers out there. Do it slow enough so that it has no impact on their system's usuability, and make it random enough so that it doesn't raise any eyebrows if someone is perusing the logs, just in case they are prone to getting pissy. Even if you can eventually get it in database form, having a backup in webpage form is insurance, and webpages aren't that hard to parse with perl then output whatever this software needs to import.