Webpro News has an interesting post today on the topic of who retains legal ownership of blog comments. Although we’ve yet to see any blockbuster court cases centered on this issue, it’s only a matter of time before one comes up.

Webpro News spoke with Tyler T. Ochoa, a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law’s High Technology Law Institute, and his comments are summarized at the end of the post:

a commenter owns his comments for copyright purposes. This means that if a blogger wanted to publish a best-of collection of comments, as Winer suggested, the blogger would likely need permission from the commenter. But just like a magazine or newspaper doesn’t have to publish letters, a blogger doesn’t have to publish comments. As far as the “right to withdraw or depublish” comments, Ochoa says this may be a more difficult matter for the blogger under European law than US law. In the US, absent of Europe’s notion of “moral rights,” without some kind of contractual agreement between blogger and commenter, the blogger can pretty much do what he wants with comments on his blog despite not having actual ownership.

“An interesting question might be whether, by posting the submission to begin with, the blogger has ‘agreed’ to distribute it, such that the blogger has a continuing obligation to continue to display it,” said Ochoa. Ochoa doubts this is the case, however, without some kind of written contract.

It’s all quite interesting, but gets us no closer to the real question on our minds: Who wrote those comment threads on 2channel that ended up being turned into the Densha Otoko television series? Does Dentsu own them or does 2channel?