
Are Tweets Copyrighted ? - tsally
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/03/29/are-tweets-copyrighted/
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timcederman
Everything original you write is automatically copyrighted (in the US and
Australia at least, and I'm sure most other countries).

In the context of Mark Cuban's tweet, republishing it is fair use
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use>).

~~~
jerf
Internet people love to declare that X is "fair use", but Internet people tend
to have much more confidence than they should. (For one thing, they tend to
read the criteria for fair use and think it's a logical _or_ operation, when
it's more of an _and_. It isn't either, really, it's what a judge determines,
but it's _more_ of an "and".)

You can't really know until you're in front of a judge, but if we take a tweet
as a work, publishing an entire tweet without permission seems awfully likely
to fail the amount test. Taking 100% of a work doesn't seem like fair use.
You're also in trouble on the "work's value" front, because it's likely that
the judge will not accept that Mark Cuban's tweets are not of some value. (A
judge might write _my_ tweets off as pretty worthless, but probably not Mark
Cuban's.) Being given away voluntarily by the owner does not prove they don't
have value, merely that the owner perceives that they have more value to the
owner in that form, value you are impinging upon by republishing out of his
control.

Your best bet at this point is to try to claim that the tweet is too small to
constitute a "work", and you're just excerpting the tweet stream. From this
point of view you pass all the fair use tests. However, my uninformed opinion
is that this is unlikely to fly, because we recognize important copyrights on
small snippets of things all the time, such as advertising slogans, and in
every other way, a tweet is clearly an atomic published work, being
independent of all the other tweets in the stream.

Maybe with a good enough legal team and the right judge, you could win a case
that republishing a tweet is fair use, but it would be an uphill battle in my
opinion.

~~~
sokoloff
_because we recognize important copyrights on small snippets of things all the
time, such as advertising slogans_

I believe that what we're recognizing in the case of advertising slogans is
trademark, not copyright. If I'm writing on the topic of advertising, I can
perfectly well say "I believe that the new slogan, 'Snickers really
satisfies!' may well be the dumbest slogan I've ever heard." without any
copyright concern.

At the same time, I couldn't sell a candybar with the slogan "Foonuts really
satisfies" due to trademark law, not copyright law.

~~~
jerf
The fair use analysis for citing an advertising slogan is very different than
it is for a tweet. You're not affecting the slogan's value the way that
republishing a tweet against the author's will can, and the purpose test is
more in your favor since you're probably mentioning it to be critical of it in
some way.

Based on my experience, at this point I expect someone to start jumping in and
trying to slice and dice their way between these standards. So let me try to
preempt that a bit by reminding you that you have to be taken to court for
copyright infringement before you can make a fair-use defense and that an
intrinsic part of the process is the judgment of the court. The judge would
laugh M&M Mars out of court if they claimed my citing "Taste the Rainbow" as a
trite slogan was a copyright violation, but republishing a person's tweet is a
radically different thing, and the question is not "can I weave and dance and
obfuscate and blur the question on the internet?", but "can I weave and dance
and obfuscate the question in front of a judge?" There is a professionally-
trained human hairsplitter in the decision loop, by design.

Mind you, I might still be wrong in my analysis; I'm not saying I can't be
wrong, my point is that pulling the whole dodge, weave, and obfuscate move to
try to show that I'm being hypocritical or that I somehow disagree with myself
is not valid.

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thenduks
Interesting. I'm not sure why one would assume a 'tweet' isn't copyrightable.
Seems to me that the real question is the part about 'fair use'. What kind of
control do you have over a tweet, even if you do have the copyright.

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edd
Publish and licence your tweets with Creative Commons: <http://tweetcc.com/>
The site was started after a discussion with a book publisher wanting rights
to use tweets in a book.

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dnaquin
<http://twitter.com/devinjames/status/1420799605>

