Who Owns Blog Comments?

If It's Your Blog, Do You Own the Comments?

The internet is a living, growing entity and as such, it's been hard for the legal community to keep up with law to cover all the eventualities pertaining to the internet. Additionally, it becomes difficult for an ordinary internet user to know what the laws are, to keep from breaking one inadvertently, when ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.

I recently ran across a news story talking about a lawsuit pertaining to an internet user who wrote a comment on someone's blog. If I'm remembering correctly, the blog was on Myspace, but don't quote me on that. The part I am sure about is that the user left a long comment on the blog, and then later turned around and used the information in the blog comment to write an article to sell for a fee. The user asked the blogger to remove the blog comment from the blog, so they could sell the article with full rights, and the blogger refused.

The legal question: who owns that blog comment?

While I'm sure the case included additional information, the question of who owns blogs comments was the central issue. So I pulled out my old legal books out and began searching through them and searching the internet.

Who Owns Blog Comments' Copyright?

Copyright law indicates that any writing is immediately copyrighted to the person who wrote it as soon as it is put in a tangible, fixed form. This means anything written, even before it's finished, is copyrighted up to the point of the last word typed or written. I own the rights to this piece of writing you are reading. That means I can choose exactly what happens to the writing, how it's promoted, how I use it, where I put it, etc.

Now, that said, I can then choose to sell, give away, or transfer my rights to a website, another person, a publication, or I can license the rights so that people can use the writing under whatever specifications I create and they agree to prior to using the writing. Blog comments are writing. As such, they are copyrighted to the person making the blog comment.

The legal answer: blog comments are copyrighted to the person who does the commenting, not the blogger.