Twitter Yanks Tweets That Repeat Copyrighted Joke

Mark Wilson writes at Beta News: Can a joke be copyrighted? Twitter seems to think so. As spotted by Twitter account Plagiarism is Bad a number of tweets that repeat a particular joke are being hidden from view. The tweets have not been deleted as such, but their text has been replaced with a link to Twitter's Copyright and DMCA policy. Quality of the joke itself aside -- no accounting for taste -- this seems a strange move for a site and service which is largely based around verbatim retransmission of other people's low-character-count declarations, recipes, questions, and Yes, jokes.

Comments

Missing link...

[wilsonmark]

... post seems to be missing a link to the article, so here it is: http://betanews.com/2015/07/25...

Re:Missing link...

[narcc]

The "joke":

Saw someone spill their high end juice cleanse all over the sidewalk and now I know god is on my side.

Re:Missing link...

[hackwrench]

It's really lame. It comes from the perspective of someone who believes a juice cleanse is a waste of money so the person who bought one got punished for wasting money when they threw up.

Re:Missing link...

[Chelloveck]

Sorry, that's not a quip, that's an anecdote.

Details

[argStyopa]

The joke is stupid; "Saw someone spill their high end juice cleanse all over the sidewalk and now I know god is on my side". Honestly, why anyone would want to claim that is beyond me.

From digital spy:
Olga Lexell, a freelance writer in LA, is allegedly the first person to publish this joke to Twitter. Tweeting this afternoon, she confirmed that she did file a request to get the messages removed.

Well Olga, your shitty joke will now be an example of the Streisand effect.

Re:Details

[squiggleslash]

Yes but now everyone will associate that joke with its author, so she won't feel like nobody knows that the world's worst attempt at a joke was written by her.

Re:Twitter-its

[Kjella]

Every thing you write (in US at least) is copyright-en by default. So every thin you post (even this post) is copyroght-en. If Twittwe yanks Tweeks over one copyright, then they need to do it for all, or get sued for illegal copyright distribution.

Which is why /. relies on its terms that among other things say:

By sending or transmitting to us Content, or by posting such Content to any area of the Sites, you grant us and our designees a worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), assignable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to link to, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), adapt, create derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display, digitally perform or otherwise use such Content in any media now known or hereafter developed. (...) Further, by submitting Content to the Company, you acknowledge that you have the authority to grant such rights to the Company.

The catch is of course that the last part might be false, I could be pasting someone else's copyrighted text into a /. comment. Since I can't give a valid license, /. won't have a valid license so they'd have to take it down. Can a 140-character phrase be copyrighted? Yes. absolutely. The courts have found that the phrase "E.T. Phone Home" was infringing when used to sell unlicensed coffee mugs. Though copyrighting a joke sounds like a joke, I can understand wanting credit but not trying to license it.