It is the case that every comment is copyrighted by its original author. This is actually a big deal, because it is not entirely clear that (for example) someon

It is the case that every comment is copyrighted by its original author. This is actually a big deal, because it is not entirely clear that (for example) someone is allowed to republish a comment thread in an altered form (like a book or magazine) without individually clearing the copyright to every comment. You can do so if it is "fair use", for purposes such as criticism or education, but some reproductions are not "fair", and yet would still be quite useful. Getting permission to reproduce a comment is often not that difficult – they have little commercial value once they've been posted online for free by their author, and they were presumably intended to be promulgated to a worldwide audience – provided the commenter is alive, has a contact address posted, and responds to that contact address. Unfortunately, none of these things are true in the long run, and the bitrot sets in surprisingly quickly. (It would be fun, for values of "fun" used by actuaries, to figure out how many comments a thread needs to have and how old it needs to be in order to have a greater than 50% chance of one of the commenters being deceased. If only I didn't have to get back to work.) If an author dies the right to manage her copyrights passes to her heirs. If you are incredibly lucky the author took the trouble to explicitly name a "literary executor" in a will, and that executor will be a single person who has been informed of the author's wishes and is happy to play ball. Most of the time we are not so lucky. The copyrights of many famous authors are firmly in the hands of their worst enemies. The rights to other works are distributed among a score of descendants and will probably never be sorted out. This is why copyrights need to expire in a reasonable time. Unfortunately, they no longer do.