May 6, 2003
MarkBernstein.org
 

Who should own comments?

I'm getting really bored with academic wrangling about ownership of casual writing -- contributions to online communities, comments on weblogs, stuff like that.

If nobody owns the writing (or if each entry is owned by its author), that pretty much guarantees that the whole lot will be tossed into the garbage sooner or later. What else can anyone do with it? It's like real property: if you make it hard enough to assemble salable title, any hunk of land can be rendered worthless.