Who owns blog comments?

Over the weekend, I had the thought, “Who owns the comments on

this blog?

“

The Reasonable Man blog has a

nice summary

of copyright law on this issue

and I think Charles’ interpretation of the

law is a well-reasoned one. While I already had a Creative Commons copyright

notice on this site, I added the following sentence:

Note that when you leave a comment on this site, you are agreeing that your

comment also falls under the terms of this Creative Commons

license.

Remember, just because the blog comment was posted in public view doesn’t

mean it’s still not copyrighted. The commenter doesn’t give up ownership of her

post just because she left it on your site. Now, do I agree with the law on this

one? Absolutely not. But that’s the way it stands right now…