The Last Podcast Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

Do What You Like With My Comments

Steven Hodson has some interesting thoughts on the discussion around who own blog comments:

Well let’s set one thing straight right off the bat – comments are not frikken creative content for crying out loud. It doesn’t matter whether you make them on a blog or at the corner coffee shop. Once you open your mouth or type the words they are gone – they are no longer yours. Sure you should be willing to accept responsibility for what you say or write – that is without question – but you don’t own them anymore. Period.

Now we can argue about the legal technicalities of what constitutes ‘creative content’ and how that affects their copyright, but I’m not really interested in that.

I think more than anything, Steven’s idea about this is a practical one: you can’t control what others do with your comments online and – really – is there any point in caring about it anyway? I think you do own your words, even if they are just comments, but what’s the point of caring about this?

If Disqus (or another blogger) wanted to claim that by using their service, I have given my copyright on my comments away to them, then that’s just fine with me (and they don’t claim that at all, by the way!). They are just comments – no more – no less. They are the most ephemeral kind of ‘content’ we put on the web.

My position here is similar to my position about distributed comments or publishing my full feed in your service (as long as it ads value beyond just scraping my text – that’s just morally wrong): I can’t control it, so why should I stress out about it?

[...] in the legal and copyrightable sense. Another post comes from The Last Podcast and they just do not care what you do with their comments, which is somewhat refreshing. Of course, no topic of comments is complete [...]