Twitterlogical: The Misunderstandings of Ownership

Tweets range from boring and useless facts (e.g., “wow, it’s cold in Toledo,” “my plane is late again,” “I’m going to poison the neighbor’s dog”) to purportedly-funny, yet useless facts (e.g., “I woke up and farted,” “she must workout,”), to interesting facts (e.g., “Americans consume 1.7 billion pounds of lard every year,” “the average burp contains 1.6 liters of gas”), to references to other facts (e.g., “check out this article in New York Post: tinyurld.com/183*&%,” “Michael Jackson auction canceled: whocares.com”), and everything in between. For this reason, to truly analyze the question of whether Tweets are copyrightable, you must differentiate between types of tweets. There may be a lurking Tweet that is protected by copyright law, but once you finish reading, I think you’ll see the probability of that scenario as being close to or at zero.

Source: Brock Shinen, Esq. (Shinen Law Corporation)

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 and is filed under Intellectual Property, Social Media, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.