Who Owns Blog Comments?

[Spinethetic]

Thought a few of y'all would find interesting

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/06/16/who-owns-blog-comments

It's a harder question than you think

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.

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....rest of article on link

[djr33]

Well, here's a question:
who owns the rights to that blog post itself, since you just copied it. Either way, you don't really have the right to reproduce it here, unless of course you're right writer, and that's self promotion, which is frowned upon here. Feel free to prove me wrong, but this looks questionable.

[boogyman]

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property

[Spinethetic]

I just thought that since this is a web design and development community that it may (or may not) prove to be an interesting read. One way or another I found my email enlisted into this mailing list of 'Web pro news' quite some time ago, most content of which is indeed, questionable, and quite frankly, a waste of my time; but every great ... great once in a while I'll see something that catches my eye.

And no I dident write it, and to be quite honest I think it foolish for a negative connotation to be applied to me in this matter considering I added no commentary about it in my post, just simply provided a link. My fault in copying the whole article though, I was in a rush getting off the computer and dident even think about cutting it in half or a quarter. That of which I shall append now.

Best Regards
~Ross :)

[djr33]

Well, if your intent was genuine, I'm sorry for implying otherwise. We get a fair amount of spam here, so I was a bit wary of that. It does seem relevant.