Who owns the content and its comments?

There is something deliciously ironic about the current discussion over Shyftr, a new content aggregator.

The issue -- who owns the content on various blogs. The way Shyftr works is that the content on many blogs resides on Shyftr as do the comments about that blog. Other readers, instead, only publish a portion of a blog posting and refer to the entire post on its original platform.

At issue are two matters -- the original posting; the comments surrounding them.

Tony Hung goes on a bit of rant about how unfair this is:

Anyway, its not the conversations being hosted somewhere else that bothers me, its that there are a new crop of services which would not otherwise exist without republishing someone else’s content without the original author’s explicit permission. Well, lots of people’s content. And you can dress it up and all kinds of clothing and all kinds of nifty wrappers, but ultimately that’s what this is about. (Click here for full post.)

There must be a few folks in mainstream media chuckling at all this. After all, the knock on many blogs is that they don't spend any resources on original content instead feeding off of others. (Where would Drudge be without The New York Times, Wall Street Journal etc.?) Now some bloggers are upset their original content is being taken over by others.

I do understand the concern over the first issue. Taking over the content is wrong, even if it doesn't involve money. However, the issue over where the comments belong is, in my view, not worth fighting. As bloggers should know, it's really hard to control comments and where they live and in many cases the users of the content, not the content creators, determine its value.

Louis Gray points out:

As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog's RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog. It would behoove me and other bloggers to be aware of the other places the conversation will be taking place, and to engage there, in my opinion, rather than railing against the continued evolution of how we're consuming content and engaging online. (Click here for full post.)

Update (4/14): Since I posted this, Shyftr has changed its position a bit. (Louis Gray talks about it here.)