MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

The landscape in the virtual world is prone to sudden and unannounced shifts and changes. You have to be on the ball to face and conquer new challenges in the most creative and innovative ways possible. Problems are compounded, however, when the law and legal concerns step into the fray, then the matter becomes more than mere debate and concrete solutions become necessary. But concrete solutions are not always that easy to come by. Consider the recent issue regarding who owns blog comments, as raised by Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews.

When you comment on someone’s blog, do you consider the comments to be out of your hands and in the sole possession of the blogger, or do you like to believe that you retain a modicum of control over your comments after they’ve been published?

According to Miller, the “intuitive” answer is that the comments belong to the blog owner, that you forfeit your rights to the comments once you’ve clicked submit. After all, when you write to newspapers or magazines you don’t expect to retain control of your letters, the publications assume control and are allowed to publish and edit them pretty much as they please. The key difference, according to Miller, is that letter writers are informed of this fact before they submit anything; many blogs don’t carry this or any other disclaimer, which is where the legal issues begin.

Is it right that a blogger be held liable for the comments on his or her posts? Comments are basically open spaces for readers to express their opinions on the subject at hand, surely a blogger can’t be held accountable for these diverse views, to do so would be grossly unfair. To date, legal proceedings against bloggers have been somewhat tricky to implement, although there has been greater success when the actual commenters are targeted. As Miller said, the fact that commenters are held liable for their views in the eyes of the law tends to favour the argument that they retain ownership of their comments.

Many bloggers, however, are of the opinion that both parties have equal claim to comments. Blogger Dave Winer believes that bloggers should be able to back up all the comments on their blogs, while commenters should be able to back up copies of all the comments that they post on a variety of blogs. Winer’s belief is shared by Daniel Ha, who created a web platform that allows blog commenters to edit, save and collect all of their comments for whatever purposes they see fit. They way Ha sees it; commenters pay bloggers for their content with their comments. And as all bloggers want to encourage as much commenting as possible, they should give commenters greater control of their stated opinions.

In an effort to clarify this persistently cloudy issue, WebProNews took it up with Tyler T Ochoa; a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law’s High Technology Law Institute. It’s Ochoa’s belief that commenters own their comments for copyright purposes, but that bloggers also have some rights regarding the content of comments. For example, they can choose not to publish comments. They can also choose to delete or “depublish” comments that elicit a great deal of controversy or ire.

Ultimately bloggers should retain control of their blogs and all of the content that appears on their blog sites. This means that they should have control over the comments that are submitted, but does not necessarily mean that they “own” them. By submitting a comment, commenters enter into a tacit agreement with the blogger to publish and display their opinions for public use, but that doesn’t mean that they then cease to be accountable for the views expressed. When it comes to control, the rights belong to the blogger, when it comes to ownership or accountability, however, comments belong to the commenters.