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Tony Byrne

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Blog comments biting the hand that hosts them

8-Jul-2008

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Implementation, Industry Standards, Marketplace at Large, InterActive, Ning, SiteLife

What rights and obligations do siteowners and visitor-contributors have with respect to comments on public websites? A couple of recent episodes raise some tricky legal and technical issues here.

Exhibit A is blogger Julio Alonso, who stands to be fined €9,000, plus legal costs by Spanish authorities for hosting some comments in 2004 that "Google-bombed" a national piracy watchdog called SGAE (thanks to Loïc Le Meur for the link). Although the ruling could be overturned, it seems Alonso was held liable for not keeping his commenters from "dishonoring" SGAE.

Exhibit B raises a rather different problem. Famous über-blogger Robert Scoble cried foul when a siteowner removed their blog from FriendFeed, thus concealing Scoble's comments on that blog that he had posted via FriendFeed. Part of the dust-up relates to the issue of where comments should go and the role of an intermediary player (FriendFeed) here, but more pointedly there's an important principle at stake. Scoble argued that his comments belonged to himself only, and not the host. What do you think? For some thoughtful commentary, see this post (and associated comments!) chez Hank Williams.

These examples pertain specifically to public blogs, but the core issues run more deeply. All the blogging tools we evaluated in our recent Enterprise Social Software Report offer comment moderation and tracking. That's nice for one-off judgments about individual posts; you approve them, or not. However, not all blog tools have notions of versioning (especially comment versioning) the way, for example, you'd see standard-issue in a wiki, whose posts are explicitly designed to be iteratively editable with change tracking. That could become a big deal depending on whether the site owner or commenter can modify any individual comment. It also matters in environments where siteowners can get called on the carpet for versions of text that may or may not have appeared four years ago.

In our evaluations, we came to see commenting as a generic service, applicable to wikis, forums, as well as blogs. In fact, many Social Software tools allow you to hang a comment service off any type of content. That's a good thing, especially behind the firewall. However, it also means you need to pay more attention to the broader challenges of user-generated content in public environments.

I think these issues become particularly germane for white-label community services. Many websites hire hosted services (e.g., Pluck or Lithium) for user-generated content or turn-key communities (e.g., Ning) so they don't have to deal with the complex scaling and technical challenges themselves. But the legal and operational obligations don't disappear. In evaluating several private-label services, we found that they differ on whether end-users can go back and edit their comment or forum postings (some services allow it; some don't). Some services also allow the community owner or admin to edit a comment, as opposed to just the approve or disapprove. That might feel like a slippery slope, but what if you want to simply remove a libelous sentence? Do you kill the whole post?

Chatting with a friend about this the other day, he suggested that the answer lay in explicit Terms of Service that establish ownership and copyright. However, those terms still have to live within the laws of your land, and if Spain is any indication, the law seems rather murky here. Honoring legal obligations on your side also implies some specific repository services (specifically archiving, versioning, and roll-back) that you may or may not find in your Social Software tool.