7 ms·

Book published using tweets without permission, backlash ensues

23 points by tbgvi 17y ago

tbgvi 17y ago
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 http://techdirt.com/articles/20100412/1844038986.shtml
tjic 17y ago
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-_Y7rgLEJ:srschwalb.com/+Suzanne+Schwalb&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7a3-_Y7...
jrockway 17y ago
Does Amazon have a config option, "only show reviews from people that actually bought the thing being reviewed"? If not, they should.
- FluidDjango 17y ago
  Not a config option, but reviewers are marked as "verified purchaser" if amazon records show they bought the item there.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    I know. But it would be nice if "sort by ranking" only included verified purchases.
  - scott_s 17y ago
    That doesn't always work, because sometimes the review is "Amazon didn't send this to me," or "This isn't the version I thought it was."
williamw 17y ago
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-press-is-trying-to-make-it-right http://tehawesome.tumblr.com/post/505919898/peter-pauper-pre...
gte910h 17y ago
I'm honestly a big proponent of fair use. I'm not sure tweets are long enough to deserve copyright protection.
- ig1 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.
    - 17y ago
DenisM 17y ago
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".
FluidDjango 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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/ http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Mac/dp/B000FKBCX4/
  - wdewind 17y ago
    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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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?
johnrob 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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?
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
macrael 17y ago
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/508615417/regret http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511063886/tweets-are-not-nothing http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511063886/tweets-are-not-no... http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511314674/dollar-sign-painters http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511314674/dollar-sign-paint... 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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
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.

23 points by tbgvi 17y ago

tbgvi 17y ago

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 http://techdirt.com/articles/20100412/1844038986.shtml

tjic 17y ago

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

jrockway 17y ago

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

FluidDjango 17y ago
Not a config option, but reviewers are marked as "verified purchaser" if amazon records show they bought the item there.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I know. But it would be nice if "sort by ranking" only included verified purchases.
- scott_s 17y ago
  That doesn't always work, because sometimes the review is "Amazon didn't send this to me," or "This isn't the version I thought it was."

williamw 17y ago

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-press-is-trying-to-make-it-right http://tehawesome.tumblr.com/post/505919898/peter-pauper-pre...

gte910h 17y ago

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

ig1 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
  - 17y ago

DenisM 17y ago

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".

FluidDjango 17y ago

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 17y ago
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/ http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Mac/dp/B000FKBCX4/
- wdewind 17y ago
  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 17y ago

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 17y ago
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?

johnrob 17y ago

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 17y ago
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?

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

macrael 17y ago

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/508615417/regret http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511063886/tweets-are-not-nothing http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511063886/tweets-are-not-no... http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511314674/dollar-sign-painters http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511314674/dollar-sign-paint... 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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago

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.