Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Says Your Tweets Belong To You
CWmike writes "Twitter has modified its terms of service to state unequivocally that messages posted belong to their authors and not to the company. 'Twitter is allowed to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" your tweets because that's what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you,' wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post Thursday announcing the modifications. Twitter is still hammering out a set of guidelines for developers on the proper use of the company's API. What do Twitterers think of the TOS changes? Barbara Krasnoff writes, ' Twitter announces new ToS. Tweeters shrug,' noting that some appreciated the company's transparency in contacting its users and pointing out the changes that were being made."
couldn't help myself!
Has anyone else using the classic index lost the ability to add tags? I'm running Firefox 3.5.2 here and can't do it.
and then he tweeted about reza and marticock
Sounds like Twitter is trying to cover their butts.
"No officer lawman sir, That is not our terrorist message, and we don't have anything to do with it. All the messages belong to the person who wrote them."
Nothing of value was not lost.
we can do whatever we want with them....
In most of the countries the transfer of ownership also transfers most of the responsibilities. These changes are preparing to the earlier announced attempts to become profitable soon. The point is to mitigate the risks of legal issues. When money is involved, it is in business sense a lot safer to be an intermediate service provider than owner and producer of the content in question.
Sounds like they get to have their cake and get to eat it too. They get all the benefits of using user generated content any way they want but have none of the liability. Good for them.
If my Tweets do belong to me, then this can be proven in exactly one way. If my Tweets belong to me than I should have the ability at any time to take them all down and they will not be seen again on Twitter unless I retype them all back in -- 140 characters at a time.
When that happens then I'll say that they've told the truth.
Until that happens, they don't really belong to me.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
All your base, are belong to us.
If you love
your tweets,
set them
free.
I'll kill
any
that get
to
me.
Burma Shave.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Forgive my ignorance. They don't host ads, they don't charge subscription fees, they don't sell your information, you don't buy anything from them. Where is the business model with this? All I see is a website giving a free service and not seemingly covering their own costs.
Actually I'm impressed. From my experiance most other sites go the route of MS when they did they Hotmail EULA change that said anything you sent through their servers belongs to MS, and if its proprietary then it now belongs to them with all rights going to MS. Theoretically if you sent patent PDFs through hotmail during that time, they would then own the patent.
Anyway, seeing twitter go the other way and up front say that the tweets belong to the authors is impressive to me.
how nice of them...maybe we all should try this.
Dear RIAA,
That song I just downloaded? I hereby hold the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" that song. But it's not stealing, 'cause it's still yours. Congrats.
If the article said that twitter claimed complete ownership and all rights to the tweets, every post here would cry foul and how sad it is in this day and age that companies still are so draconian.
But instead we get people bitching that they are just covering their own asses. Like we havn't seen posts suggesting that doing so is right thing to do time and time again.
Or complain that the company still retains some rights to the tweets, oh no, the company still maintains the same rights they did yesterday. How horrible it is that only some changes happen!
But hey, maybe I'm new to slashdot...
Look at the terms of service for YouTube, Flickr, or Slashdot for instance. Copyright remains with the poster but a license is granted to the service so that it can do its publishing thing.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Because they're so fucking banal that the only people who could possibly be interested in tweets are the narcissistic douchebags who wrote them
I'm just sad that so many people seem to think public proclamations, however banal, could possibly be "owned"
"I took a poop today." (c)2009 Digital Vomit
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Yep. Because as we all know from Slashdot Law 101, liability for things said on the internet attaches to the holder of the copyright. If only Bin Laden had a decent deal with the RIAA!
For His Noodly Sake, the idea that the parent post is worth 5 precious insightful points is an insult to the thinking community.
Twitterers? That doesn't sound right. Surely the correct term is twats/twits?
SQL programmer goes to a bar. Walks up to two tables and says 'Excuse me, may I join you?'.
They decided to keep only the good and profitable stuff.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The city sewage treatment plant has announced that everybody owns their own flushings.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
If a tweet if writ by Pete
for a terrorism feat,
and the cops are on the beat
to drag him through the street.
He'll point fingers at his peep
and claim "Twitter is a *bleep*"
But the ToS are neat
And Pete will be fucked.
Why does Twitter want to be a dumb pipe? All they do is shuffle 120 characters of text around. All value is added via third parties--the various clients using the API, TwitPic, URL shorteners. They won't add metadata, apparently hacked solutions like free form text that take up the already limited character space are OK. Now they give up ownership to all the content on the platform. Their board is really asleep at the wheel if you ask me. They are TOO open.
Twitter would make a lot of sense as a free, open platform, like IRC. It makes no sense a business with hundreds of millions of dollars invested in it.
> They claim all usual rights of ownership, but foist responsibilities back on the user.
Well, shouldn't the person who wrote the tweet be the one responsible?
I have a hard time seeing why Twitter should be responsible for what its users say. Why would they accept liability on someone else's behalf?
and this isn't me either.
use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute
Given that the US copyright code only limits reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, display and transmission (17 USC 106), is there a good reason why "use", "copy", "process", "adapt", "modify" and "publish" are in that list?
(IIRC, the BSD license has the same list of terms so this question's been bugging me for a while.)
...ummm so twitter has said that you have the rights that you always had.
Content you produce always belongs to you, but the terms of service do say that they have a world-wide license to do with your produced content as they will. So the only thing they can't do is stop you from distributing it again yourself.
But they can still publish a book of your tweets and not pay you a cent.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
...ummm so twitter has said that you have the rights that you always had.
Can we maybe lose the extreme Marxist douchebag vibe that seems so prevalent around here, Slashdot? It's really getting old.
Companies can't do anything right. If they genuinely do the wrong thing, as with DRM etc, then it is understandable to condemn their actions; but you're condemning Twitter here because they are affirming their users' rights?
I for one commend Twitter for this. It's radically different from the way a lot of companies behave; i.e., "Use our service and we own your SOUL." Here, they're saying that they're not even trying to be avaricious about users' material.
I hope this serves as a positive example to other such providers.
Finally
I can't wait for the courts to have to decide what the legal definition of "fair use" is for an inane 140 character post usually consisting of so many stupid tags/abbreviations it's unreadable to 99% of the population.
Or maybe Haiku has finally found its niche!
Quoted Twitter post
RT @bob On the crapper!
Lawsuit may ensue.
They are saying it, but not in their terms of service. Thus they are actually misleading users as to their rights.
Their terms of service are similar in this respect to myspace, and a number of other web 2.0 services they are actually not different at all.
An ethical provider would limit the license you release your content to them under to only allow them to use the content in ways required to provide you with the service they are offering you. eg.
"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."...as required to provide the twitter service to you.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
So what? They're covering themselves for when somebody uses them coordinate something illegal, a drug drop spot, a robbery or heaven forbid a terrorist attack. Who cares, Twitters's a fad technology with less usefulness than direct mail...which the irony of to those pushing it can't be lost on... The concept is e-mail via the phone...which is an electronic letter which is....