Comments are not creative content - Get over it!

May 29th, 2008 | By Steven Hodson | Category: The Social Web

FriendFeed conversation - click for larger view This whole discussion about comments is becoming borderline stupid. I can grasp the whole point over comment fragmentation after all it bothered me for some time as well. Content creators would generally love nothing better than to have the whole discussion happening within their personal realm. Some because they want the Long Tail pageviews that come with 50, 200 or even 800 plus (as I saw on one blog today) comments while others what to be able to be a continuing part of the conversation they may have started - but without having to go looking for it.

There is another whole group that treat the comments that result of their blog posts as free agents to roam wherever they want. With endpoints like FriendFeed we are finding many of the comments being drawn together and in some cases they even end up back on the originating blog - which is a good thing but not a requirement.

But then today I see a thread on FriendFeed started around a shared item from Andrew Dobrow with a title of Who Owns All These Comments? You? Us? Someone Else? - which links back to a post on ReadWriteWeb by Josh Catone. As interesting as Josh’s post might have been my interest was more in some of the comments around the post on FriendFeed as they began talking about comments belong to the person making them and whether we needed some sort of Creative Commons agreement for them.

Well let’s set one thing straight right off the bat - comments are not frikken creative content for crying out loud. It doesn’t matter whether you make them on a blog or at the corner coffee shop. Once you open your mouth or type the words they are gone - they are no longer yours. Sure you should be willing to accept responsibility for what you say or write - that is without question - but you don’t own them anymore. Period.

Creative content - the stuff you can copyright - is that which flows from your mind as original thought or as derivative content based on other works with proper credits given. Saying that a comment is considered to be owned by anyone and thereby protected by any kind of  copyright is ridiculous. Where this changes is if you take the germane parts of the original post as quotes (with proper link credits) and go to your own blog and create a new thought or idea from that base then you own the content.

Acting like kidsConversations regardless of where they are held are not original thought in the typical sense of copyrightable works. Conversations; or for the picky among you - comments, are just that .. a bunch of people sitting around a virtual coffee table talking about something. I thin the time is coming when we have to start acting like adults and accept the fact that beyond certain parameters we don’t own our words and get on with more important things. Instead though we act like a bunch of kids in a sand pile whining about what is ours and what isn’t.

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Viewing 7 Comments

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    I can't even put it into words... so I made a bookmarklet to do it for me!! :-) i want people to grab the bookmarklet, then use it to "fix" Stevens original blog post... now I bet people's intellectual property rights are all of a sudden worth fighting for... http://www.mattshaulis.com/win_extra_bookmarkle... (for the record, I disagree with this post. I think comments are a vital piece of the ecosystem and there are plenty of people who leave valuable comments that contribute and shape the landscape. I do not blog, instead I wander around the blogosphere doing my "blogging" via Disqus and other comment forms. Sure there is a lot of drivel in the comments of some posts... but there is a lot of gold buried below the post... I'm not ready to write it off... or "get on with more important things". The comment "thing" is pretty important for the future of social media as far as I'm concerned.)
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    Matt I agree with you that comments are an integral part of the conversation ecosphere but what I don't find of any use anymore is the constant whining about comment fragmentation or some other catch phrase. You can go back to the days when NNTP newsgroups were all the rage and the idea of hijacked threads or cross-posted messages - it doesn't matter what you do the conversation *if* it is good will spread out on its own viral path.

    All we can do as bloggers is make it as easy as possible for people to leave comments as well as setting an example of doing it ourselves rather than dedicating all our conversation to aggregators like FF.
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    For obvious reasons, I'm not a fan of the phrase "comment fragmentation" either. :-)

    I agree with every word in your comment, regardless of how I seem to have misinterpreted the blog post. To me, the blog post said that comments are not creative. And I, someone who does not blog despite requests for me to do so but does comment at great length all over the web, take personal offense to the notion that comments are not creative content. i try to be creative in my comments. I've been complimented on them, reprimanded for them, they have been the root of long debates, flame wars, etc.

    I feel, via Disqus, that I own my comments. Legally, I own them. if a blogger were to take one my comments and write it into a blog post, I like to think that I would be given credit... even though I did not post my thoughts in a "blog post" proper, I posted it via an identity I manage personally, Disqus.

    So based on those two factors... I'm thinking that while I agree with your comment right there wholeheartedly, I still disagree with some of the notions set forth in the post. I got the impression that comments were of less value than blog posts... which is why I wrote that bookmarklet to take every instance of the word "comment" in this blog post and change them all to "blog post"... it's a whole different read then, and an interesting experiment in opinion.
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    Here's the deal. Say you're at a blog and are about to leave a comment that is so totally profound and original, you don't want to hand it over to the blog you're visiting. Go back to your own blog and write a post, and link to the blog post that inspired it. Problem solved; quit whining about comment copyright.
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    Steven, you misunderstand the law and the core issue of the (many times absurd) ongoing discussion: Title 17 of the US Code defines copyright law, and what's granted an immediate copyright. At no point does it define a "creative work" (I'm not sure what that would be), but it does define an "original work" and a "derivative work," both of which are protected in the scope of copyright law:

    § 102. Subject matter of copyright: In general

    (a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the following categories:
    (1) literary works;
    (2) musical works, including any accompanying words;
    (3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
    (4) pantomimes and choreographic works;
    (5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
    (6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
    (7) sound recordings; and
    (8) architectural works.

    (b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

    Beyond that, section 106, 106A, and 107 defines the exclusive rights to a copyright holder, and the limitation of those rights via fair use. The executive summary of this is, the original author of a work has exclusive rights to publish and republish his or her content AND the right "to prevent any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of that work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation, and any intentional distortion, mutilation, or modification of that work is a violation of that right" EXCEPT when his or her work is being presented for the purposes of conversation or discussion.

    Now for comments, the fact that they are about something else does not change their copyright protection status. They are publicly available written literary works that contain original thought (my analysis of your work is an original thought; if you need an analogue, take a look at movie reviews. They're copyrighted, too.)

    You can take a look at the entire law here: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html

    What does this all mean? If you want to get legal about it, bloggers are going to lose. Every single time. But that's not the issue here. It's not about defining things like "creative work" or "original work." It's about what's the social obligation content producers, content distributors, content aggregators, and readers have with each other. What rights do I need to give up to you and what rights do you need to give up to me in order for this to work?
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    I think the problem arises when, in simple terms, people write really, really long comments which might be better suited as blog posts. From a practical perspective I think it would almost be impossible to enforce any kind of CC protection because there's very little to prevent me from using your name, as an example Steven, and then posting something while I pretend to be you. Unless we have Disqus, of course, but that's not perfect either.
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    This conversation reminds me of the days when people asked whether or not, they owned the data that they put onto sites such as Facebook. So, the bottom line is, a comment is (just there) not owned by anyone except cyberspace perhaps?

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