> Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them?

Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it.

> Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish?

That you can

> Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores?

Copyright law always applies, and the post are always the property of their writer. The site has a license to use them in a limited fashion. To try to do otherwise is likely a terrible idea.

I'd argue while it's fuzzy, there's a distinction between people coming to your blog because it's your blog and leaving a "This!" or a question, and people building their own community on your infrastructure.

Eg, you probably don't want to grant that AWS owns your entire website just because it's hosted on it, right? The main thing about your website is your work, AWS is merely the replaceable infrastructure to run it.

> each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster

This is why services usually make it a condition of being allowed to post in the first place that you grant them a worldwide perpetual irrevocable license to the content, via the EULA.

And you can see why: having to ask all the users for permission in the future is completely infeasible, so just ask once upfront for everything.

It’s not infeasible it’s just not in the near term economic interest of the server owner to help facilitate the commenter’s rights

This is one of the biggest STRUCTURAL issues with the legal structure of property - you are not incentivized for supporting a common good.

The technology to build an embeddable comment widget on top of a framework that would compensate commenters based on their inputs is trivial at this point.

Good luck funding such a project though because every source of capital wants infinite return. So unless you’re willing to volunteer your technical time or have your own money to spend nobody will create and grow services like that because the economic incentives aren’t aligned between people who want to invest and … society at large at this point

> Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it.

The way around this is to make users agree to some terms of use to assign rights when signing up, which is what Reddit did.

Yes, but it's still a limited license to use it. The primary ownership is still with the comment writer.

It really depends what's in the terms the user agreed to.

You can look it up, you retain copyright.

And while Reddit does have you agree to giving permission to almost anything, they'd be nuts to take that too far. If eg, Stephen King goofed and pasted his upcoming book into a comment mid-AMA, I don't think Reddit would fare well in court if they tried to argue the TOS gave them the right to do turn that into a book.