As a few of you have figured out, you can read our blog on the Kindle. I know a few of you know this because I have received a very small amount of money from Amazon – a good deal less than the annual expenses of maintaining this blog, and those expenses are probably only in two figures anyway.

Simon pointed out that not being able to read comments on the Kindle is a problem. The reason for this is that WordPress.com separates posts and comments into two separate feeds. So I was just over at the Kindle Publishing site, about to publish the comments feed as a separate Kindle blog, when I realized I had no idea what the copyright status of comments is. In particular, if I do publish the comments feed on Kindle, I will make (a paltry amount of) money from other people’s work.

Now, I am guessing I am probably on firm legal ground doing that, since there are lots of blogs that make money (though few that make a lot of money), and they are all to some degree making money off of their comments. I think I’m on firm ethical ground as well, since the amount of money is so small that there is just no way to distribute it to the commenters that would not cost more to implement than the revenue I would receive. But I wanted to know: (a) if anyone knows of a good discussion of this topic (I can’t be the first person to think of it) and (b) if any of our regular commenters cares one way or the other.

Thanks.

By James Kwak