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Twitter Says Your Tweets Belong To You

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the learning-from-other's-mistakes dept.

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."

18 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. All your tweets are belong to you! by chrisj_0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    couldn't help myself!

  2. CYA move by jmanforever · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."

    1. Re:CYA move by MBCook · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That way my immediate thought. It's a nice thing to do (compared to the "we own everything you type" option), but I figured this way simply because they are getting too many contacts from people's lawyers and want to put themselves in a position of lower risk.

      Not that it stops screwballs from suing you. Google has been sued over stuff that has nothing to do with them because their search engine points to pages that say whatever.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    2. Re:CYA move by Jurily · · Score: 2, Insightful

      All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 SourceForge, Inc.

    3. Re:CYA move by Chris+Burke · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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."

      They don't need that kind of CYA. None of the places that do claim to own everything you write are held accountable for that kind of thing. They throw in a few disclaimers, and at the end of the day they might be asked to take something down but they aren't going to be prosecuted for having hosted a terrorist message whether their TOS automagically claims ownership or not.

      I think that they just realized that they can basically ask for every relevant right they need in their TOS anyway, so they can earn some cheap good PR with their users just by giving up on their plans to publish "The Poetry of Twitter" without having to pay any of the twit authors.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
  3. Cake and eat it! by Cryogenic+Specter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. If They Truly Belong To Me... by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... by amRadioHed · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Are you implying that you can't do that right now? What's stopping you?

      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
    2. Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's a square deal as is. You get to keep the copyright for your "work", but you cede the rights necessary for Twitter to disseminate your thoughts. You don't cede them to anyone else, and Twitter can't sue you for reusing your deep thoughts somewhere else.

      The ability to revoke your stuff would indeed be nice. But to say that without it the deal is meaningless is just lame.

    3. Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... by shentino · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why whine? You can't retract your slashdot posts either.

    4. Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... by bertoelcon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Except, once something reaches the internet proper the odds of removing all instances of it drop to near 0.

      --
      Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
    5. Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... by thenextstevejobs · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Except, once something reaches the internet proper the odds of removing all instances of it drop to near 0.

      While this is true, this has nothing to do with Twitter! You could have set your account up as private, in which case it could not be scraped by people without your permission, thus generally fade from the caches of the Interwebs. Turns out its hard to get rid of anything. Shredded paper could be reconstructed. If someone really put their mind to getting your information, they probably could.

      --
      Long live the BSD license
    6. Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... by mrsquid0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      When you write a book the content belongs to you, but you do not have the ability to recall and erase every copy of that book in print. Why should it be any different for electronic publishing, such as Twitter?

      --
      Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
    7. Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... by bennomatic · · Score: 2, Insightful

      thus generally fade from the caches of the Interwebs

      All due respect to Vegas, what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet...

      --
      The CB App. What's your 20?
  5. Re:Your tweets belong to you but... by truthsearch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Same as on /. Look down...

    All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 SourceForge, Inc.

    --
    Developers: We can use your help.
  6. Re:Your tweets belong to you but... by itsdapead · · Score: 4, Insightful

    we can do whatever we want with them....

    What alternative do you suggest?

    Option A: don't claim the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" tweets. Problem: publishing material on a website involves using, copying, transmitting, displaying, adapting, modifying and distributing it, so they would be infringing copyright and, sooner or later, get sued by some troll (in other news: Twitter operates in countries outside the US which don't have the same "fair use" clauses in their copyright laws).

    Option B: claim ownership of everything. They could do this if they wanted to - nobody forces you to post your 120 character masterwork on Twitter.

    Option C: lock out the public and pay professional twitterers to produce pithy and erudite tweets on a "work for hire" basis. Tempting, but I don't see the business model.

    Your call.

    --
    In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
  7. Re:Your tweets belong to you but... by genner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    we can do whatever we want with them....

    What alternative do you suggest?

    Option A: don't claim the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" tweets. Problem: publishing material on a website involves using, copying, transmitting, displaying, adapting, modifying and distributing it, so they would be infringing copyright and, sooner or later, get sued by some troll (in other news: Twitter operates in countries outside the US which don't have the same "fair use" clauses in their copyright laws).

    Option B: claim ownership of everything. They could do this if they wanted to - nobody forces you to post your 120 character masterwork on Twitter.

    Option C: lock out the public and pay professional twitterers to produce pithy and erudite tweets on a "work for hire" basis. Tempting, but I don't see the business model.

    Your call.

    D: Move the server offshore and pirate other people's work.

  8. Re:Where is the money? by Locke2005 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They don't host ads... not for long! This is a typical dot bomb strategy - first you get lots of users, then you change the rules to start generating revenue, then you cash out quickly before everybody quits due to the rule change.

    --
    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.