Are We Watching the Redefinition of Intellectual Property?

Who owns what?

There's a battle going on right now, and it's spreading to every possible domain: what exactly IS intellectual property, and who owns it? In an era in which copyright protection is seemingly extended indefinitely, a la the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, corporations are seemingly trying to prevent anything from ever entering the public domain, while consumers growing ever more enamored with the idea of free.

In the software industry, you have the opposing sides of over-zealous patents versus Open Source software. The movie industry and music industry are both fighting file-sharing and musicians willing to experiment with free music giveaways and set-your-own-price models. And online we have the increasing argument over intellectual property when it comes to content.

Bloggers are, essentially, writers, just like any other. Yes, the editing may not be as precise, the tone may be less formal, and the form may be much shorter, but we are writers nonetheless. And while few go to the trouble of registering copyright, they should, and Sarah Bird at SEOmoz has excellent advice for doing that for the constantly updated format of a blog. And we accept that bloggers own the content that they create, even if they do see it scraped by splogs on a regular basis. But who owns the comments?

User-generated content is rapidly approaching a very murky area. Blog owners generally retain the right to delete comments, as do owners of other types of sites. But they really don't own the content, do they? The people who created the content, be it comment or video, are the rightful owners. But as some bloggers still resist the fractured commenting taking place on sites like FriendFeed and Shyftr, claiming that the conversation is rightfully theirs. Purely from an intellectual property standpoint, they obviously don't, but the fragmentation is frustrating and nearly impossible to keep track of for bloggers.

Now, however, with the addition of all these social sites for commenting, the ownership struggles are becoming more and more apparent. When some bloggers became frustrated with the amount of comments being made on their blog posts on FriendFeed and deleted their accounts, ALL of the comments on threads they "owned" were deleted, regardless of who had made them. In the FriendFeed schema, the owner of the item apparently owns the comments.

I'm sure that the bloggers in question aren't too upset about it, since they didn't like having the conversation there in the first place. But did they own the content of those comments? Conversations naturally fork; should they be deleted along with the accounts? As a blogger, I may not like having conversations everywhere, but I recognize that I don't own any conversation. I don't own what people say, and because I don't own it, I can't control it. But as we push this envelope into shapes unlike the traditional one, are we changing what intellectual property is and who has the rights to it?