Who owns blog comments?
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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…
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