Who Owns Copyright On Tweets?
We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.
Twitter can’t tell you whether or not you create or own a copyright – it doesn’t have the legal ability to do so. So if you own any copyrights, it’s not because of Twitter not owning them, it’s because the law provides for ownership of them which initially vests with you, the author.
Twitter also […] encourages users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms
6 responses
First off, as a general rule, as soon as you write something original, copyright arises automatically - it's owned by you as author until you transfer it by written agreement to someone else. That "written agreement" could take the form of website terms that you "accept" (informed consent? yeah right - but that's another argument). But, as you note, twitter doesn't claim copyright so tweeps will own copyright in their tweets.
Cases have held that snippets as small as newspaper headlines or a single bar in a piece of music are deserving of copyright protection. Those cases are at the outer limits but they are there.
So, I think it's reasonable to argue that there may be copyright in a tweet.
Often the question will then be whether a substantial part of a work has been copied (e.g. is one bar so integral to the song that copying it is a substantial rip). But, that doesn't arise here because we're assuming that the whole tweet is used.
The real question then is whether the use that the copy is being put to is an infringement. Two reasons why it might not be:
- there is an implied licence in the whole set-up of twitter. The whole functionality of twitter is based on re-tweeting and anyone using it must be taken to have accepted that. BUT, what are the limits of that implied licence? Can I put it in a book with 100s of others as was recently done? On a t-shirt? In a film? That is where we'll have to wait for case-law. In a fast paced socially networked environment, if you got a tech savvy Judge, I can see a tweet with a high degree of originality and uniqueness being protected from, say, being copied and re-packaged for commercial sale. If Shakespeare wrote "to be, or not to be, that is the question" today, that would be protected by copyright. The lower the degree of originality and uniqueness, the less likely that will be though. Difficult to predict, but copyright is like that. As one judge in a leading case said - if it's worth copying, it's worth protecting. That's a petty good yardstick still.
- the other possibility is one of the statutory exceptions - what David is referring to when he mentions fair use. The problem in NZ is we do not really have a fair use exception. We have certain very limited "fair dealing" exceptions for educational use and current affairs reporting but not much else. We can't even copy something for parody or satire here. This is where we differ substantially from the US. So, none of the statutory exceptions would apply to a book or t-short for example.
A fascinating issue - thanks for raising it.
Great post Courtney - great idea to raise....and Creative Commons is a fabulous simple way to get people thinking about what they intend when they publish ANYTHING.