23 Apr 2007

Who Owns Blog Comments?

[Company] is monitoring every place that people can submit comments online and copying the conversations into a massive database. Discussions are mapped, influential people are identified and [Company]’s software then helps clients engage in the conversations or directly contact the influencers.

Our local Sunday paper ran this article this weekend, about a company seeking to help businesses track and affect their on-line reputations.

You can Google up the company in question through the above article—I’m intentionally not posting their name or linking to their site as I want comments from the blogging community and not responses from the corporate representatives.

While, from a client perspective, I can see the value of a tool that allows high-level analysis of their reputation online, what bugged me as a blogger/content provider is idea of “copying the conversations into a massive database”, which immediately made me feel violated.

It begs the higher question—who owns the comments left on blogs and discussion forums?  It seems like often the site owner, for legal reasons, disavows any ownership of user comments and assigns that ownership to the comment author.

So, as the owner of the comments and thoughts I leave online, are my rights being violated by being copied into a database for analysis?  Or am I just being snide because someone found a way to make money off my contributions to the internet, and I don’t get any of it?

Comments

1
Daniel Morrison
April 23, 2007

As copyright law applies, your comments either owned by:

* the site owner
* you

Really, you only transfer the copyright to the site owner if they tell you via a TOS or some sort or notice on the comment page.

The act of putting comments in a database doesn’t violate copyright, though selling them (unless it is just a list of links) or republishing them certainly does.  If you were collecting them for yourself, you could claim Fair Use, but once you start selling that information, it seems like you’re in dangerous legal waters.

IANAL, so someone can prove me wrong.

2
Frank Johnson
April 23, 2007

I’m not a lawyer either, but my suspicion is that there is nothing illegal about collecting the comments, analyzing the data, and then profiting from the analysis. If a company were to profit from the data itself (i.e., the content of the comments) by selling it, as Daniel mentions, then (as Daniel says), there would probably be copyright infringement (assuming copyright can be claimed in comments). But I don’t think this company is trying to sell the data itself. They’re trying to offer a service to companies based on their analysis of that data.

I’m of two minds on this. In my day job, I would love to have access to a tool that would help me monitor my company’s reputation in the digital realm. Where I have a problem with it is the suggestion that I might be able to influence/manipulate that reputation in ways which violate the culture of the blogosphere.

So I’m always trying to steer the executives at my company away from a strategy of finding the influencers to get them to talk about our company and instead encouraging them to try and be a company that the influencers want to talk about.

Frank

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