When you leave a comment on a comment, how often do you wonder what your rights are? Not too often, I’d guess. Over the years, it has become an accepted fact that content contributed to a website simply belongs to that website. If the website, or blog for today’s web, goes away then all of your contributions disappear along with it.

A real world analogy would be sending in letters or artwork to a magazine. There’s usually that disclaimer which says the publication can do whatever with your submission. And, of course, they can’t return anything to you. It belongs to the magazine now.

A different view

The landscape, however, is somewhat changing. It wasn’t too long ago that big media began to realize that they need to embrace their audiences. One dimensional publication became two dimensional and refocused around users, the people that consume and contribute. Leaving comments has become more than just simple responses. Many are very long and well thought out. They’ve essentially become blog posts left on others’ blogs.

Do comments need to solely belong to the blog on which it sits on? I’m not so sure it does. Comments are, in some way, the currency in which bloggers are paid for their posts. Bloggers want to encourage active discussions on their site. A way to encourage discussion is to give the participants more control of their contributions.

This blog post is largely inspired by Hank Williams’ blog post which asks, Who has comment copyright ownership? Hank makes the point that blog platforms and services such as Disqus should make this clear for both bloggers and the people who comment. I agree.

Rights and Control

So what are a commenter’s rights? I’m going to make an initial attempt to materialize what some rights should be.

a) The ability to edit and remove their comments
b) Access to all of their comments, even if it has been deleted on a blog
c) The right to use their own comments as blog posts. After all, a commenter is just a publisher not writing on his own website.
d) A life for the comment beyond a single blog. I want to take my comments with me, even if the blog shuts down.

This may seem threatening to the publisher, but it really isn’t. A commenter should have rights to what they post, but bloggers should still have control over content that appear on their blogs. Bloggers should still control:

a) Whether or not someone is allowed to comment on his blog
b) The deletion of a comment
c) The modification of a comment, as long as the original copy is still accessible and the edit is transparent

Ownership

All of this may result in some ambiguous notion of shared ownership between commenters and bloggers. This needs to be clarified somehow, preferably with the cooperation of all the companies and services doing things in this area.

Tool and Platform

I don’t want us to be hypocritical. We’ve heard the charges: our platform is proprietary and we store comments on our server. This is true. However, we’ve embraced openness from the start with our API and willingness to open up our platform to anyone to build on. We’ve spent some time thinking about where to go from here and we’ve come up with something that could be great. I won’t talk about it now, but I can say that it involves everyone playing nicely together, including our competitors.

Regarding ownership, I want to make it clear that Disqus does not want to own your comments, whether you are a blogger using Disqus or a reader commenting on this system.

We position ourselves as two things: a tool and a discussion platform. I call it a platform because people are using what we’ve built to create new tools for conversation. This excites us over here.

This platform is moving toward openness. I feel this will help us succeed as a company. Disqus began to solve problems of fragmentation and we don’t want to create further fragmentation by being closed. We will come out on top because our tools and products will be better, not because the platform is locked.

Moving forward

We have learned a lot in the recent months. The next major updates to Disqus will explicitly address a number of these issues right in the service itself, including a clarification of a commenter’s rights in our policy.

This is only a first draft to solicit some thoughts. Fred Wilson recognized it as a straw man proposal. He’s right. We want to generate discussion and ideas. What do you think? Whether you blog, comment, or both: what is important to you?