Recently a prominent, prolific contributor left and took his blogs with him. Meaning they are deleted. But that means that my comments and any other person who contributed to a blog also had their work deleted. And by "their work", I mean that normally if you think of something and write it in your own words, then that is your work.

Say I write "Graham's harsh questioning of Sotomayor and then purported support show posturing is a predominant part of his psyche" as a comment on a blog about Sotomayor. The poster decides to leave TPM and delete the original blog. I don't know this and at one point decide that I'd like to use that comment and run with it but doesn't remember exactly what I wrote. But, crap, it's gone.

A lot of blogs have more value in the subsequent conversation after the blog than in the blog itself. Which begs the question: Who ownes blog comments? Type in "who owns blog comments" in Google and you get a few answers, often depending upon the user agreement of the site that one's on. The main three responses that I've found are:

1. If you comment you are automatically relenquishing your content to the original blogger. Which means that whatever you write belongs to the original poster, so if it's deleted in a huff, so be it.

2. Doesn't matter, anything written on a site belongs to the host site. Meaning that TPM owns everything on here.

3. What you write belongs to you. Meaning if I comment, then that's MY comment, dammit. You can't touch it.

Some of how we deal with the issue comes down to how we feel about content and the culture at our site. There is a bit of outrage about this poster leaving and deleting here. And I kind of agree with it. Looking at TPM's comment guidelines , there's no mention of who owns what. The TPM terms of use adds information that pertains to posters, the crux being:

TPM does not claim ownership of the Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the TPM websites. The Content is the property of the author of such Content. You agree to grant TPM a perpetual, royalty-free and irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, create derivative works from, transfer, and sell such Content in any format now know or hereafter created, and to use your name and other identifying information you provide in connection with that Content. You also permit any visitor or member of the TPM websites to use such Content for personal use as described above.

But isn't my comment my comment? Isn't my comment my content? The terms of use basically eliminate my #2. Besides, just the fact that I can delete my own blogs also means that I control my added content. So #1 or #3 are left: Either the commenter owns the comments or the original blogger owns it. But again, since the original poster has the power to delete everything including other's comments, implicitly that means that the answer is the answer is #1: On TPM, the poster owns the comments.

So if you comment on this blog, are your thoughts now my thoughts ?