
Book published using tweets without permission, backlash ensues - tbgvi
http://www.amazon.com/Tweet-Nothings-Mini-Charming-Petite/product-reviews/1593597770/ref=cm_rdp_hist_hdr_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
======
williamw
A friend of mine has a Tweet in the book. Here's what the publisher said after
he gave them his two cents:
[http://tehawesome.tumblr.com/post/505919898/peter-pauper-
pre...](http://tehawesome.tumblr.com/post/505919898/peter-pauper-press-is-
trying-to-make-it-right)

------
macrael
Merlin Mann is one of the people whose tweets were used without permission. He
detailed his perspective in three blog posts:

<http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/508615417/regret>
[http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511063886/tweets-are-not-
no...](http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511063886/tweets-are-not-nothing)
[http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511314674/dollar-sign-
paint...](http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511314674/dollar-sign-painters)

This is a mann who gives away most of his life's work. He loves fair use and
believes in sharing. However, when doing so, he believes that he has control
over what of his work is shared and under what terms. Publishing a book and
charging money for other people's work without their permission is
emphatically _not_ fair use.

Anyway, he writes well on the subject, I would recommend reading his
perspective because he is someone who makes a living giving away most of his
work and had thought a lot about what that means.

~~~
decode
You're right, his perspective is fascinating for several reasons:

1) He makes the argument that he has some natural right to control the
entirety of his creative output. In the US (where he lives), this is not true,
it has never been true, and we can all hope it will never be true. This
statement, as an example, is complete nonsense: "I control every fucking
syllable of anything I’ve ever done, regardless of whether I sell it or not."
He has the copyright to some of the the work he's done, which is a completely
different (and much less powerful) animal.

2) Except for the parts about him giving away most of his work, his posts
could have been written by the PR departments of the RIAA or MPAA. He
repeatedly talks about stealing, and the poor artist being hurt by the
pirates, when no theft happened. Why doesn't he just talk about copyright
infringement?

3) He talks about fair use and licensing, but the salient point is that he
likely never had copyright on the tweets in the first place. If something is
in the public domain, fair use and licensing never come into play.

~~~
GHFigs
You're picking it apart but you seem to have missed his point entirely. It's
not about money or even having the trivial words taken. It's about being
attached to something that you aren't actually attached to, or more
specifically, not having control over what you and the work you've done are
attached to. See, that's the bothersome thing. As he writes:

 _Because when some dick weed uses and sells my stuff without permission, I
seldom lose anything more than theoretical (non-)money from a junk project
that’ll be forgotten in a month or two. Whatever. Happens every day. Don’t
care. Nope.

But. When somebody creates the indelible impression that I relinquished
control of my work in the service of that complete piece of shit when I did
not? Well. That, to use an old publishing term, is fucking bullshit._

This is exactly how I feel when I see "blog comments" that are actually just
scraped from comments on other sites (like HN). It's not that I want
compensation at all: I just don't want my name and words attached to something
I had nothing to do with, and it's infuriating that there are so many people
out there who feel entitled to do exactly that just because I happen to have
put some words on the internet without asking for money.

------
anigbrowl
I am not very sympathetic. To me Twitter is a public stream, and you have as
little right to complain about your output there being republished _in the
context of a large quantity of other people's tweets_ as someone whose
likeness or property appears in a photograph or film taken on the public
street (where the emphasis is on the street as a whole rather than the
individual person or property visible thereon).

Yes Merlin, your tweets are 'nothing', and your window is not broken, any more
than a photograph of your window from the sidewalk would have been forbidden
by copyright. I'm afraid I am classifying all the hullabaloo over this as pure
poutrage.

------
gte910h
I'm honestly a big proponent of fair use. I'm not sure tweets are long enough
to deserve copyright protection.

~~~
ig1
Why should copyright depend on the length of a piece of work ?

You can't measure value by size.

The standard definition of what's copyrightable is based upon creativity. So
the shortest expression of a statement of fact is unlikely to enjoy copyright
due to it's lack of creativity. But even a single worded creative expression
on the other hand would likely enjoy protection (reasonably I believe).

Remember that copyright is unlike patent or trademark law, in that if two
people independently come up with the same creative work then they'll both own
the rights to it.

I'm a strong advocate of fair use (in that I've actively been involved in
political lobbying on the issue). But there's no fair use case here, taking an
entire work of creativity (a "tweet") in it's full and reproducing it for
commercial gain just isn't fair use.

You could argue that there's been an implicit agreement on the authors part to
allow redistributing (i.e. re-tweeting), and indeed such an argument has been
used successfully historically in comparable situations (i.e. Usenet)

~~~
ahoyhere
Of course copyright should have a minimum length of expression.

There's a reason why quote compilations don't get their publishers sued... by
famous people, who actually say serious and meaningful things. When the
twitter shirt debacles happened, quite a lot of lawyers came forth to give
their opinions that tweets are simply too short to constitute original works.

Repeating someone's tweet is no more copyright violation than quoting
Hemmingway's 6-word novel, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." And a damn
sight less moving, I bet.

Oops, I copyrighted violated again.

And I bet Hemmingway never ran a Tumblr full of somebody else's photos. And
quotes. And videos.

What we're seeing with the "outrage" over the book is not anger at being
quoted, which of course happens all the time (and is perpetrated by the
twitterers in question) -- but the sneaking suspicion that SOMEBODY IS MAKING
MONEY!

Which, of course, is faintly ludicrous.

~~~
ig1
In what language ?

Does it mean if we can compress a text to below a certain size it stops being
copyright ?

The international convention is on originality/creativity - the US copyright
office has taken the stance that the creativity requirements can't be met by
short phrases.

But many courts around the world have provided rulings based upon the same
international conventions protecting snippets of text. For example 11 words
were considered protectable in:

[http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-
bin/gettext.pl?lang=en&...](http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-
bin/gettext.pl?lang=en&num=79909283C19080005&doc=T&ouvert=T&seance=ARRET&where=\(\))

Last year the Australian High Court rules that slogans were copyrightable:

[http://www.simpsongrierson.com/assets/publications/oym/OYMAp...](http://www.simpsongrierson.com/assets/publications/oym/OYMApril09.pdf)

In many country sports statistics are also often considered copyrightable,
even though they contain even smaller amounts of information than a sentence
of text.

~~~
gte910h
> the US copyright office has taken the stance that the creativity
> requirements can't be met by short phrases.

Actually, in the US, meaningful short phrases sometimes can. Some guy (who's
name currently escapes me) has had a court confirm his copyright on his
epigrams (he sells books of them or somesuch).

------
jrockway
Does Amazon have a config option, "only show reviews from people that actually
bought the thing being reviewed"? If not, they should.

~~~
FluidDjango
Not a config option, but reviewers are marked as "verified purchaser" if
amazon records show they bought the item there.

~~~
jrockway
I know. But it would be nice if "sort by ranking" only included verified
purchases.

------
DenisM
Well, if people can copy my tweets without permission I can't make a living
anymore and I will have to stop tweeting...

Nope, that's not coming out quite right.

I dunno, where does the triviality boundary lie? If I put together green shirt
and blue jeans, do I now "own" the style for having invented it? Surely not.

Maybe grellas will enlighten us on how long does a work has to be before it's
considered "an original work".

------
johnrob
Two different ways to look at this interesting situation:

1) A tweet is no different than an email sent to the entire world. Like an
email, if you want to protect the contents, you should include a disclaimer.

2) A tweet is a small blogpost, subject to the same content ownership rights.

~~~
pyre
You're also forgetting that a tweet is 'something that someone said.' If I
published a book of quotes overheard at cocktail parties, or just walking down
a busy street in the city, would I be falling into the same issues?

I think that the length of the tweets also comes into issue here. Tweets can
only by 140 characters long. If I made a book that was a compilation of
140-character quotes from blog posts, would I fall into the same issues? Can I
not use a tweet as a quote under fair use just because 140-characters is also
100% of the content, and not just a portion of the content?

------
tbgvi
Reminded me of the mini-debate today about who 'owns' HN comments.

Some commentary and the author's apology letter can be found here:
<http://techdirt.com/articles/20100412/1844038986.shtml>

------
FluidDjango
At the moment the book has 28 1-star revs; 1 5-star review.

In 10 years of using Amazon intensely I've _never_ seen such an overwhelmingly
negative response!

~~~
kevinh
The computer game Spore had a very large negative response due to the DRM
SecuROM being used. Interestingly, publishers use SecuROM often now and much
of the backlash has disappeared. It shows how being on the crest of a wave can
hurt your product, but following it can work out.

<http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Mac/dp/B000FKBCX4/>

~~~
wdewind
Wow I never realized Spore was so bad (although from the reviews it sounds
like they were based as much on poor game play as draconian DRM). I remember
being excited about it and then not hearing anything and forgetting, thanks
for the link.

------
alfredp
The real question is - would people be foaming at the mouth if this was an
e-compilation that didn't cost you anything to download?

~~~
j-g-faustus
I think it would be much less anger if the collection was free. But why is
that the real question?

If your blog quotes from and links to my blog, that's an endorsement, and I
would probably be happy about it.

But if you print out my blog and sell it on Amazon, I would definitely be
pissed off.

Some behavioral economists say that people operate in two modes: A "warm and
fuzzy reciprocity" mode used with friends/family/neighbours/colleagues and a
"coldly calculating market" mode used whenever there is money involved.

If you collect a few entertaining tweets and publish them on your blog, most
people would probably consider it within the spirit of reciprocity - it's a
shared resource with no specific owner.

But by selling the collection, you are breaking the implicit social contract
that governs reciprocity and switching to market mode. In market mode I will
obviously demand my fair share of the profits, and by not offering it you are
breaking the social rules for market interaction as well. (See "thief" -
exploiting other people's effort for profit and offering nothing in return.)

So yes, selling the book probably generates more anger than giving it away.
But it's not much of a mystery why that is so, is it?

------
tjic
The "author" has yanked down her personal domain, but you can find her resume
in google cache here

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7a3-_Y7...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7a3-_Y7rgLEJ:srschwalb.com/+Suzanne+Schwalb&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

