Charles Cooper at CNet's news.com website has a thought provoking article about commenter rights. He mentions a blog post at Disqus' corporate weblog that proposes a bill of rights for comments. Support for comments in business blogging software is important because it fosters one of the most important blogging benefits -- customer engagement.
I took a look at the list of rights he mentions, and while the question is interesting, I think that the scope of the rights as proposed verges on overkill.
A comment posting feature helps to encourage reader participation. Where I think the commenter rights goes off the deep end is the implicit assumption the comment area is the sole venue by which the conversation must continue. I think it is just one channel, and to make commenting as feature rich as proposed would turn a blog into a bulletin board where only one user is allowed to initiate a thread.
Rather than a complicated system of post, edit, track, and remove operations, backed with policies that determine whether an after-the-fact edit is OK, why can't we just live with a simple social contract? A blogger shall allow comments from anyone. A commenter is free to write what he or she wants. Either party may delete the comment, but once the removal has been done, it's irreversible. That saves the commenter from regret for posts written in the heat of the moment, and at the same time it prevents the airbrushing that Cooper worries about in his post.
In other words, the relationship between blogger and commenter is that of a host and a guest in a house. The host invites guests, and has the right to dismiss them for bad behavior.
The question of comment ownership from a copyright standpoint is a bit tougher. Of all the comments that I have left on blogs, I've never felt a sense of ownership in the sense that I thought a blogger would needto seek permission to republish my content. If a reader is that passionate about retaining the right to determine whether the blogger can republish, he or she should probably write the comment as a full post on his or her own blog and then post a link in the comment section.
The level of discussion that the bill of rights has raised should give pause to companies rolling out a corporate weblog. Let your readers speak freely and don't be too quick to decline comments. Your customers may not always be right, but they are definitely worth listening to.
