implemented

A couple of days ago, Josh Catone had a post up asking "Who owns all these comments?". The post was inspired by an article by Hank Williams asking "Who has comment copyright ownership?". On ReadWriteWeb's comment policy Josh writes:

Whenever someone leaves a comment on this blog, I think the assumption is that while we may not own the comment itself (we won't try to stop you from posting it elsewhere), we at least have been granted full publishing rights to use it as we please. We've always reserved the right to republish comments in other posts (with attribution), as well as remove comments we felt were offensive or inappropriate.

This sounds like a sound policy. A bit discouraging though that he writes that he "think[s] the assumption is ...". Anyhow, I was inspired to comment on Josh's article, and I repost my comment here in its entirety:

An interesting subject that urged me to comment. Here some random thoughts:

If you write a comment, I think you own it in the same way as you own the content of a blog post you write (assuming you post it publicly, provide a feed etc.) That is, others, including the site owner, has the right to link to it, publish an excerpt, or even republish the whole comment, as long as he or she gives proper attribution and does not change the wording of the comment.

If you intend to republish the comment to monetize it in a direct manner, like selling a book, maybe you should ask for permission if the comment is significant in terms of length and/or originality.

Since the comment lives on someone else's site, the site owner has the right to remove it if it's offensive, breaks some law, is spammy etc. But here it becomes interesting where to draw the line of what's ok and what's not. Should you allow comments that are only insignificantly related to the subject of the post, is clearly intended to just promote some other content, or maybe seems to be relevant, but is just cleverly disguised to promote something else?

I think that you should be cautious in removing comments that are not clearly spam, unless you explicitly state on your blog or site that certain types of comments will be removed. Otherwise, if you remove some legitimate comment, you effectively practice censorship, and could (or should) be publicly blamed.

My two cents, perhaps slightly off topic, let's see if it gets removed.
/Jonas

This comment is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

As I point out, I think it is a good idea to have a clearly stated comment policy on your blog, especially for larger blogs that get lots of comments.

Hosted comment service Disqus also joined the discussion and suggested a few points of a "Commenter's Bill of Rights", including a commenter's right to edit and remove his comments, access to all of his comments, even if it has been deleted on a blog, and the right to use his own comments as blog posts. As for publishers, their rights should include whether or not someone is allowed to comment on their blog, to delete a comment, and to modify a comment, as long as the original copy is still accessible and the edit is transparent. All of these I think are valid points and in the interest of both commenters and publishers.

I don't get many comments on this blog, though I got some on my Web 3.0 posts. I remove comments that are clearly spam or totally irrelevant, but otherwise I'm quite liberal, adhering to a generous policy I hope.

Commenting for me, on a larger blog like RWW, is a way to get a few a more readers than I get here, and might even lure some occasional readers to this blog.