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Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Here's a head-scratcher with a deceptively obvious answer: When a person comments on a blog or website, who owns, or owns the rights to, that comment? Is it the commenter or the blog/website publisher? It's a trickier question than you might think.
Editor's Note: What may come of this is a need for bloggers to have a posted policy regarding comments. Like with viewer submissions to TV shows, radio call-in programs, and letters to the editor, bloggers may have to forge a contract with commenters in order to reuse or repurpose blog comments. Um, if you don't mind us sharing ownership of your comments, let'er rip in the comments section.
The intuitive answer, an opinion shared by some prominent bloggers, is that once a commenter comments, they submit the comment with the knowledge they've lost control of that comment forever. Of course, there's more than one way to look at it, but there is also more than one platform (or publishing model) to consider, and at least a couple of legal aspects to explore.
A newspaper or magazine editor, for example, elects to publish response letters from readers. Not all responses are published, and thanks to some legal language, letter-writers are often informed they lose, to some extent, ownership of those letters.
In a sense, blog comments are similar. A blogger can elect not to publish a comment at all, or she can edit or delete a comment for various reasons. But there are stark differences, too. Most of the time, there is no written agreement about comments as there is with submitted letters. Another difference: Once a print publication publishes, the content can't be unpublished. Along some (strong) lines of logic, though this hasn't been fully tested in the legal system, this sense of permanency subjects print publishers to greater liability than digital publishers.
That, and the Communications Decency Act (so far) has protected bloggers from being liable for third party comments. Though they've tried, lawyers have had a tough time in court going after bloggers for something a commenter said. They have had more success in going after the commenter, if they can force identifying information from the blog host. This commenter liability would suggest a definite ownership of comments.
However, it could be argued also that a commenter no more owns his comment than a person quoted in an article "owns" his quote. (Quotation ownership, though, is perhaps a different animal altogether, and one that walks lines of ethics—or even attribution etiquette—more than legal ones.)
The idea of comment ownership reached the foreground last week in the form of a blogger spat between famed blogger Robert Scoble and Texas-based consultant and blogger Rob La Gesse. An argument that may have been unlikely a year or two ago came about because of microblogging/Web-conversation platform FriendFeed.
La Gesse, upon discovering his membership with FriendFeed meant Scoble's comments were transferred from his blog to a new location on FriendFeed where a new conversation could begin, deleted his FriendFeed account in order to keep the conversation closer to home. Upon doing so, Scoble's comments disappeared from FriendFeed altogether, a consequence La Gesse appears not to have intended. Scoble, offended by the deletion, protested by claiming he owned his comments and La Gesse didn't have the right to delete them from FriendFeed.
Though this case appears to be an issue with FriendFeed's user interface rather than La Gesse's defacto censorship, Scoble presented an entirely new debate about comment ownership. This prompted A-listers and new blogging platform pundits alike to weigh in.
Self-described original blogger Dave Winer decided both parties own the comments. "I decided that it's a mutual thing. I own the collection of comments on my blog, and you own the comments you've placed on my blog and all others. I should be able to back up a complete set of comments on my blog, and also back up a copy of all comments I've placed on all blogs."
About the Author:
Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology.
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