Twitter and copyright

May 31st, 2009 Posted by Missie at 12:23 am

Copyright is a part of every new communication and technology and although it may not be as important to you as getting your 140 character tweets out to the twitter world, knowing your rights when using twitter is something we should all take a note on.

Twitter as a technology raises copyright questions that are not easy to answer. The microblogging service is difficult to fit into any of the current copyright paradigms and seems to challenge what many think about posting on the Web.

Your twitter rights

Twitter has made it clear from the very beginning that you own your own rights to anything you post or add to twitter. Unlike other social networking and blogging sites that have controversially claimed your material as theirs, twitter has allowed its user to own their own intellectual property.

Although it seems some what impractical that 140 characters could reach the standards of copyright as the question of original work and authorship come into play, some tweets could be copyrighted if they met the description and, almost certainly, a collection of tweets from the same person could be copyrightable if they could be seen as one large work broken apart over many entries.

As there is yet to be a ruling on such a copyright case in the twitterverse, it seems highly unlikely that the content posted on tweeter (being 140 characters or less) could warrant valuable enough to have a lawsuit filed against it. But, as twitter continues to grow, we can only wait to see what the future entails.

Possible breaches of copyright on twitter

Since the character limit on twitter makes it difficult to enforce or infringe copyright, the greatest risk is the ability for twitter users to swap URL links that may contain material against guidelines.  Services such as TwitPic, a photo sharing website though twitter accounts, opens the door to possible infringement. However, as twitter is not directly involved with such applications and resources that open user sharing through twitter, the issue of infringement or copyright would go through that service.

A note to remember

While the character limit on twitter could possibly be smaller enough to keep us safe from a lawsuit, it’s important to remember that sharing your personal or others material and content on twitter can lead to possible sticky situations such as copyright infringement.

While users of microblogging and social networking websites can become complacent about copyright and infringements on the world wide web, it’s easy to loose sight of the things we do, what we say and how we say it can lead us into predicaments we’d rather avoid.

What more information? Read twitters terms of service.