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Can You Copyright a Tweet?
- bena 17y agoInteresting enough. But let's take a step back. Sure, a single tweet may not be copyrightable, but what about timelines? Couldn't someone consider their Twitter timeline to be a body of work? Think about Fake Micheal Bay, Darth Vader, or other fake users who exist solely for entertainment purposes. No single tweet is important, however the image they convey of the character is described in these 140 character chunks. Pretty much a work of fiction. It would be like trying to say that words and sentences can't be copyrighted because they are too small to comprise anything substantial, but ignoring books, songs, plays, etc. A case for missing the forest for the trees.
- CodeMage 17y agoIn this case, I'd say that the author is trying to stop people from staring at the trees, so that they can tour the forest.
- bena 17y agoHe never makes that claim. He focuses on whether or not a tweet is copyrightable as a body of work. He never brings up or implies that a person's timeline might be something more than the sum of the individual tweets. His answer to the question is no for various reasons. He never delves into the higher levels. He takes the question simply at face value. If asked whether words or sentences are copyrightable, his answer would be the same for all of the same reasons. However, we intuitively know that words and sentences are not the end product of writing and don't base copyrightability on the basis of words and sentences being copyrightable.
- eelco 17y agoNote that this partly specific for US law, not all countries require registration for copyrighted material.
- swolchok 17y agoI was definitely under the impression that your work is still protected even if the copyright is not registered. It is interesting to know that registration is necessary to bring a lawsuit. If you can't protect your copyright, does it really exist?
- mustpax 17y agoLet's rephrase the question: can you copyright aphorisms? Because Tweets are no different than other bodies of written work except for their length. The author seems to pick out a bunch of straw-men, or, ahem, straw-tweets if you like, to point out as un-copyrightable. He then moves on to say that he has yet to see a single copyrightable tweet. It would be more interesting if he picked out genuinely interesting tweets and argued why even they didn't pass muster. Yeah, you can't copyright facts. But you can copyright certain stylized restatements of facts. You're copyrighting the specific and unique utterance, not the fact itself. The author even concedes that you could possibly copyright a tweet if it was a haiku. I've seen plenty of tweets that embody the same kind of concise harmony as haikus.
- gojomo 17y agoNo doubt, most individual tweets don't rise to the level of copyright protection. But he hides the strong counterexample until his second-to-last paragraph: established law confirms tiny poems, specifically haiku, are copyrightable. And he ignores the interesting question about related strings of tweets. Individual letters aren't copyrightable; string enough together and you have everything else that is copyrightable. He spent all his words on the trivial matters!