Has anyone else considered whether Ray might be using his blog as the basis for one of his new books..?
If so, and he's planning on using the comments in his book, it would be worth considering the copyright issue.
All of us making comments have copyright in the creation of those comments. As soon as you create work "fixed in any tangible medium" (paraphrase), you have copyright. I'm British, but as I understand it, the copyright law on this particular point is identical on both sides of the Atlantic.
The law is somewhat blurred, however. When posting a blog comment, you are clearly granting the blog owner a licence to display your copyright work, but the limit of that license is somewhat unclear.
I am sure that none of us here would like to think of Ray using our words to profit (or indeed 'prophet'*... ). He has, as you will have seen, a set of guidelines, but they refer to the importance of capitalising the name of jeebus and his friends, not using bad words, and worst of all, the use of links that might possible assist his readers in seeing through Ray's dishonesty. From a little research, it seems that best practise is to include a 'Terms of Service' to clarify the sitation. This might state something like the following (from http://www.reasonableman.com/ where I've got some of the info for this piece):
Information Rights. The Proprietor does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service, including without limitation comments you post to the Service, you grant the Proprietor world-wide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free, non-exclusive, fully sub-licensable license(s) to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed.
Although that might appear scary, it's not actually unreasonable and is enforcable... as long as your readers are aware of it before posting. With Ray's blog, there's no clarification on this matter, and therefore, it cannot be claimed that a person could be reasonably expected to know that they were giving away their rights to their copyright material.
I therefore propose that until such time as Ray introduces such a Terms of Service, that all posts to his blog contain some sort of following caveat:
"This comment is copyrighted and is licenced for use on http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/ only. No licence is granted to further use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed without the written permission of the copyright holder."
* sorry...
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