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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, wh

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.

electromagnetic 17y ago
I don't believe the author has any legal right to payment for someone copying their tweet (their tweet log is a different story), as you said quote compilations get away with it all the time. However, copyright still stands and the author of the tweet has the legal right to be attributed alongside the quoted tweet, but as the 'work' would unlikely be sold for profit then the author wouldn't get a penny from a judge anyway. The difference between a tweet and Hemmingway's 6-word novel is that he could (and did IIRC) make money off of it.
ig1 17y ago
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&num=79909283C19080005&doc=T&ouvert=T&seance=ARRET&where=() http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/gettext.pl?lang=en&#38... Last year the Australian High Court rules that slogans were copyrightable: http://www.simpsongrierson.com/assets/publications/oym/OYMApril09.pdf http://www.simpsongrierson.com/assets/publications/oym/OYMAp... 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 17y ago
  > 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).

electromagnetic 17y ago

I don't believe the author has any legal right to payment for someone copying their tweet (their tweet log is a different story), as you said quote compilations get away with it all the time. However, copyright still stands and the author of the tweet has the legal right to be attributed alongside the quoted tweet, but as the 'work' would unlikely be sold for profit then the author wouldn't get a penny from a judge anyway. The difference between a tweet and Hemmingway's 6-word novel is that he could (and did IIRC) make money off of it.

ig1 17y ago

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&num=79909283C19080005&doc=T&ouvert=T&seance=ARRET&where=() http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/gettext.pl?lang=en&#38... Last year the Australian High Court rules that slogans were copyrightable: http://www.simpsongrierson.com/assets/publications/oym/OYMApril09.pdf http://www.simpsongrierson.com/assets/publications/oym/OYMAp... 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 17y ago
> 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).