Slashdot Mirror
The Copyrightability of Twitter Posts
TechDirt has an interesting look at some of the questions arising about the copyrightability of Twitter messages. I haven't seen any actual copyright lawyers weigh in yet, but it certainly will be interesting to watch the feathers fly until someone nails down the answer. "[...] it seems like there would be two issues here. The first is whether or not the content is covered by copyright — and, for most messages the answer would probably be yes (there would need to be some sort of creative element to the messages to make that happen, so a simple 'hi' or 'thanks' or whatever might not cut it). But, the more important question then would be whether or not ESPN could quote the Twitter message. And, there, the answer is almost certainly, yes, they could, just as they could quote something you wrote in a blog post."
140 Characters? You can copyright 140 characters? Maybe. Can you copy this post?
Copyright © 2009 Morgan Greywolf. All rights reserved.
My blog
...automatically assumed to have copyright attributed to the author?
I had no idea Twitter had some mystical "copyright-defeating aura" about its service.
hookers and grits.
as soon as you create something, it is protected by copyright.... as long as you're in the US (YMMV in other countries)
and yes, ESPN can quote.... as long as its newsworthy.... news is covered by fair use...
plus, ESPN is owned by Disney.....
they can get away with anything....
Why are we all a twitter over something that was twittered when it should have been tweeted. Or are we tweeting over something that was twittered by using a twitter that refused to tweet?
Tweet tweet?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Its not long enough, the snippets would have to be sufficiently expressive to be copyrightable. Like an entire haiku might be copyrightable, but a sentence, idea, thought, or word is not. Otherwise you have copyright law protecting slogans and phrases (the work of trademark law).
The copyrightable expression circulation (circ 34) is currently down, but its normally found here: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ34.html
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
...automatically assumed to have copyright attributed to the author?
I had no idea Twitter had some mystical "copyright-defeating aura" about its service.
The only thing about Twitter that is "mystical" is its ability to stay popular and relevant well past its 15-minute window...
I agree, but have you ever stumbled flicker? There are some really awesome photographs and image manipulation.
Seriously... you're an idiot if you are going to twitter about taking a shit or a piss. If you're going to twitter something meaningful, like hey I'm on the subway and its being delayed b/c some jackass jumped off the platform and I'm going to be late to (wherever). Then supposing you're friends are following you they will know... where you are and why you're late.
Twittering is no more idiotic than instant messaging. Its like an email list for instant messaging. It has qualities a chat room lacks like a degree of permanence.
But hey lets make another joke about twittering your bathroom habits and maybe you'll get modded +5 funny and not just redundant.
You can't copyright facts, for example. If you get up on a soapbox on Main St. and yell that the Mayor is a space alien, the local paper can report that you did so without any invocation of copyright. They can quote parts of your screed under fair use. TFA discusses this part, if you'd read it.
140 Characters? You can copyright 140 characters?
Apparently. And things like C&D letters, and ... Whatever happened to the purpose of copyright being promotion of science and the useful arts?
These things are created for a specific purpose, which does not require them to be sold, and they would exist regardless of being copyrightable. So WTF is the point of them being copyrightable?
Fair Use
Fuck you copyright abusers.
I realize that this is just inquiring what would happen if a legal issue would occur, but we all know that eventually some dumbass will sue a twitter for copyright infridgment.
I can't believe that for once I agree with a post from cts =P
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
Not very? I see a lot of passionate rhetoric, and very little legal reasoning to back it all up.
I'm guessing a judge wouldn't really be swayed by it either, since you don't offer much in the way of reasoning, legal precedent, or rational basis for your argument.
While most of Slashdot may hold these "truths" to be self-evident, they're not quite so self-evident to the congressmen and -women making the laws, nor are they generally to the judges & lawyers arguing the cases.
in short - less qq, more reasoning. IP law r srs bsns.
I'm taking a huge green dump and I'll be late to the Meadows. Don't go in the bathroom in the Reddington station for awhile, it smells like a cow died in here.
Just a simple proof:
Character count is less than
One hundred forty
Copyright © 2009 detachable_halo.
Could it be that we make fun of Twitter because the majority of people actually think we care about their day-to-day bullshit? I've seen "accomplished" bloggers tell everyone how they went to a book store and found a great book they'd been looking for. Then 15 minutes later "ooooh, I'm reading the book", as though we thought they'd leave the damn thing unread for a year. Two hours later "This book is pretty intense".
Might as well be:
"Sitting down to take a shit"
"eww, smells like asparagus doesn't agree with me"
"damn, this one's gonna hang and break, and I'm gonna have to wipe even more"
"remind me to never eat at Joe's again"
Instead they could have written "hey, I read this great book I bought yesterday and it was awesome. I'd been looking for it for a while. Highly recommended." One post, under 140 characters and doesn't make it seem like they're a fucking attention whore.
In short: Look, you aren't famous and you're not going to get your 15 minutes of fame by writing utter drivel. The odds are against you and if you're not famous now, writing bullshit ain't gonna endear us to you enough to get you nominated for an Oscar. You're probably mediocre and should accept it that most of us don't care any more than that 13 year old girl cares about your hemorrhoid problems when you tell her in the checkout line.
In the TOS instead of saying the author keeps the copyright and that they suggest they submit it to the public domain, Twitter can just take it upon itself to do so. If anybody will get upset with that... well, thats kinda ridiculous.
All creative pieces of work you create are copyrighted. Just to put it clearly. The author alludes to it, but decided people already knew. Some people's comments indicate they didn't understand this so I wanted to clear it up. Which puts up a good point. Topics like these really show how little copyright laws have stayed with the times. The ease of reproducibility makes it near impossible for copyright to make sense anymore. The laws were not intended for the technology we posses and need to be revamped.
Ok. Plan B: I'll write a perl program to enumerate all possible 140 character combinations and post them all to Twitter. Then I'll sue anyone else who posts for copyright infringement! That'll show them who's boss!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While most of Slashdot may hold these "truths" to be self-evident, they're not quite so self-evident to the industry lobbyists making the laws
There, fixed that for you.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
but hey if you think you can come up with something original , creative, non-obvious and non-derivative in 140 characters, more power to you.
no one can sue Cortney Love for Libel. Because no matter what she says its still coming from Cortney Love and lets face it if your reputation can be damaged by what she says you don't have a reputation.
this sort of reminds me of the stupidity of suing an anonymous poster on a web site. Until you sue them its just some meaningless rant from an idiot on the internet and is pretty much ignored. But once you file a lawsuit you add validity and public attention to there statement. In reality you cause the damage to your reputation by suing.
But by all means, continue to miss the point and "fix" my statements with snarky, irrelevant bold text.
Some folks do write the good stuff, even under 140 chars. *You* need to find a better class of twitter-folk.
It doesn't sound like anyone's going to write to win *your* favor, either way. Quit'cher bitchin'.
Why are we even discussing this? no of course you can't copyright 140 characters in a specific sequence and of course I can write the same line everywhere I please, without giving a crap about what the original author thinks or having to pay him. Why you ask? because its frakkin' common sense. Slashdotters usually agree on not wanting to end up living in a police state, brought forth by the endless new IP legislation. By discussing and thus taken seriously that 140 chars, what amounts to a sentence, you're not doing yourself or the rest of us a favour. Its ridiculous and the courts should dismiss such claims outright.
Nope. Quit that wager before you lose your shirt.
Tweet posts are copyrightable works as long as trivial outliers are avoided. Ignoring issues like TOS grabs, the lower bound is much shorter, perhaps down in the 1 word range.
You can fit two haikus per tweet - no one's going to deny the creativity there!
Just because most people burn their characters on facile content doesn't automatically strip away the copyrightability.
What's happening is that it's hard to find a Fair Use fragment since the whole is so short.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Ad slogans are encroaching on this end. They take ordinary usages out of parlance with a slight twist to tie in with a product brand.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
+7 Insightful.
We spent our time moaning over the RIAA's effects on copyright in the music context, but the damage they caused spills over to all copyright situations, including this one.
"Little people" like to be known, but Big Corps in a bad mood wouldn't like rampant copying.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I TAHT I taw a putty tat!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Oh, come on, have a sense of humor :-)
I'm not hurt you that you bashed circletimessquare. I find myself constantly considering whether to foe him, in fact, but then I decide that I just don't care enough.
Believe me, I know that /.ers hold a lot of nonsense as common sense, esp. when it comes to stuff like IP.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
If you're going to twitter something meaningful, like hey I'm on the subway and its being delayed b/c some jackass jumped off the platform and I'm going to be late to (wherever). Then supposing you're friends are following you they will know... where you are and why you're late.
Or, you could send a regular text message to only the friend(s) you're supposed to be meeting up with, so not to bother people not involved in the plans with your trivial minutiae.
It's a hypothetical example; not like there's going to be a cellular signal down in the subway system, anyway.
Ad slogans are encroaching on this end. They take ordinary usages out of parlance with a slight twist to tie in with a product brand.
Are you sure that's copyright and not trademark?
Uh, no.
Using just a-z (no numbers, symbols, punctuation, whitespace, or capitalization), the number of different combinations of 12 characters is 95,428,956,661,682,176.
It would take over 3 years, spidering at a constant rate of 1 billion links per second, to traverse that space.
Limiting copyright to just twitters would mean a 140 character space, with about 69 standard characters characters. ([A-Z][0-9][ ,.'"`~!@#$%^&*()_+=-\?/;:{}|[]])
That's a search space of about 2.7470888312671105153324051810719 * 10^257.
One-hundred forty;
that is all the space you get.
Haiku is covered...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
dibs on [*jI{,0lWbI9Xor1R]0&7jumJk_u7O3rY~;T+L@b.j{gYny,K)2cs'P>s03*_G}8F9mQe.4tx/[Q}T^I^q,Rx\pkm$vLLsdr,QDr`XgXhB*fwh0VYf}43J(w=5Ia'):nb"1li)
okay, I'll bite, what is the most worthless?
A whole new meaning to "Boston Tea Party"
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
It'd be a good object lesson, though. There's an ancient curse: "May you get exactly what you wish for.". The monkey's paw, the genie in the lamp, there's a pattern there.
Well, with Twitter, when you send a message, it only goes to people who follow you. (Yes, it's also visible on the public timeline if your updates aren't protected, but I don't think many people really read the main timeline and then get mad that their time was wasted.) If you want to message to be specifically for someone, you can either a) use the "@" notation (e.g. @donttrythis Going to be late. Someone peed on the third rail & got electrocuted. Myth confirmed?) or b) send a direct message (e.g. d donttrythis Going to be late. Someone peed on the third rail & got electrocuted. Myth confirmed?) The "@" notation will be seen by everyone, but they will understand that it is intended as a comment for an individual (albeit one that everyone can see). The direct message isn't viewable by everyone.
If an individual is sending too many trivial minutiae messages, there's a simple solution: unfollow them. Once you do that, the person can post as many trivial messages as they like and you won't be bothered by a single one.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Then you have an accomplished blogger who doesn't get how to be engaging on a micro-blogging service. Not surprising. Would you dismiss blogging as an idiotic idea because some prolific novel authors tried their hand at blogging and wrote nothing but inane posts? Of course not. Not everyone is going to be able to excel at all possible means of communication. And that is all Twitter is. Another method of communication. Some will use it to post every trivial detail about their lives and some will use it to post more interesting content. For an example of interesting content, there was a series of tweets a few months back by Adam Savage from Mythbusters which included some comments (and photos) about a myth they were testing.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You just need to voluntarily tell the world with one update which license you use. TweetCC is a great website to help you with that: http://tweetcc.com/
" ... The first is whether or not the content is covered by copyright -- and, for most messages the answer would probably be yes ..."
Sorry. Nope. Not a chance. Never. Specifically mentioned in most copyright law as un-copyrightable, no less. Like titles. You have a song titled "Away with their heads'? So do I. The lyrics are different? Good then. Not actionable. Live with it; the world has for a century.
Too short, and an enforced limit at that, taking the doubt right out of it. If it's not a form of poetry and formatted as such, there goes pretty much your only chance.
And in other news, Shakespeare is suing all those monkeys for copyright violation.
I don't think most judges would be amused to spend the court's time to decide such a case and they may toss it on the basis of De minimis non curat rex.
By the way, when researching this I found the following on the first page of the Copyright Offices FAQ list. "How do I protect my sighting of Elvis?" That itself is less than 130 characters. I think I'll go tweet "My sighting of Elvis."
How do I copyright a name, title, slogan or logo?
This space unintentionally left blank.
... but from my experience with identi.ca, yes, 140 character messages are indeed copyrightable, at least according to it's ToS: "All Identi.ca content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license."
No, I'm not a lawyer.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Legally, a twitter update can contain copyrightable information in 140 characters, but I don't want to get into the legality aspect, but rather refute the assertions that people make that it is trivial. It is the aggregation of a bunch of tweets; there's plenty of examples out there. Twitter's not hot because of twitter.com/home, it's because of all the real time data that you can get from other pages.
Let's say for instance I wanted to write a book about anything; I could search twitter and take ideas from it. Who's to say that you couldn't take all those ideas and change them so they fit your book idea. That would be copyright infringement on a large scale. Does it not seem like a violation of rights?
While there's certainly an argument to be made against frivolous lawsuits and being able to assess damages there is also a very clear cut way to leverage other people's tweets outside of the intended use.
Since you cannot copyright dead skin that falls off your body, and Twitter posts are about as useful as that...
ESPN and the newspaper can only use a "fair use" amount of your material. So ESPN can't use all of your 140 character creation, they can only use a fair amount of it.
Since typical fair use wouldn't exceed 10%, we should agree, then, that "fair use" of 140 characters should be no more than 14 characters? I suppose that quote in the first part of my post is actually a violation of Anonymous Coward's copyright. Sorry, Anonymous Coward. You can sue if you want. Or, y'know, read up on the debate here over fair use.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Yet many models other than capitalism can sound as absolutely as insane as this baseless straw man if you go grossly out of your way to make it so.
Of course, that is why /nobody/ is advocating pure capitalism and /nobody/ is advocating pure socialism, or pure communism or pure environmentalism or whatever. All such purities can be made into absurdities.
Seriously... you're an idiot if you are going to twitter about taking a shit or a piss. If you're going to twitter something meaningful, like hey I'm on the subway and its being delayed b/c some jackass jumped off the platform and I'm going to be late to (wherever). Then supposing you're friends are following you they will know... where you are and why you're late. Twittering is no more idiotic than instant messaging. Its like an email list for instant messaging. It has qualities a chat room lacks like a degree of permanence. But hey lets make another joke about twittering your bathroom habits and maybe you'll get modded +5 funny and not just redundant.
Oblig: Le Twittre.
how is babby formed?
I think Twitter is the first popular thing that I just don't get. It may be a sign of me getting older. But it just seems like something designed for women (or people who like to snoop in to other people's business). That seems a bit sexist, but it is just what I observed.
I have a facebook page so that I can connect with friends I haven't seen for a long time. But the females I know, they all like to go on to other people's sites to look at their pictures and see who they are dating and read their blogs, etc. I really could care less about all of that. And that is all Twitter is...a way for people to feel important and snoop on each other. The vast majority of it is boring/useless noise. I think people have every right to do whatever they think is fun...but this is one of those things that makes me look a little funny at them. Really...you are so special that people need to know what you are doing all the time?
And I don't think it is anything like IM. IM is targeted to specifically communicate with someone for a reason. Twitter is a bunch of people talking in to space for no real purpose other than for...well, I don't know what. Showing off? Trying to get attention? Bah, just strange. I guess I should follow this with...Get off my lawn!
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Fair use has a posse! It's name is ESPN
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
It's my understanding that if you quote an insignificant piece, that's simply a quote. If you quote the whole work, then it's infringement.
IANAL, but I don't believe your understanding is correct. The important factor is not what percentage you quote, but your intent and purpose in doing so. Larger sections (up to and including all) are harder to justify, but quoting a whole work could be justified in an academic context.
There's also the issue of things like merger and scènes à faire .
Under the merger doctrine, courts will not protect a copyrighted work from infringement if the idea underlying the work can be expressed only in one way, lest there be a monopoly on the underlying idea...
Under the related doctrine of scenes a faire, courts will not protect a copyrighted work from infringement if the expression embodied in the work necessarily flows from a commonplace idea...
This is all going to be particularly relevant in the case of something like Twitter. As the court observed in the famous Apple vs. Microsoft "look and feel" suits, "[w]hen the range of protectable expression is narrow, the appropriate standard for illicit copying is virtual identity." So "insignificant piece", as you suggested, is not going to be the limiting factor here.
Probably.
Of course, if the person whose twitter posts you're quoting is particularly litigious, it may be expensive to prove you're in the right, even when you are.