Who Owns Your Tweets – Twitter, Or You?
Consider this, if you will: I decide to write a book through Twitter, 140 characters at a time. Moroever, I do this stream-of-consciousness style, and just let it all flow out. I keep no backup. I write my book, tweet after tweet after tweet. Soon, thousands and thousands of my words are in the system.
For their own reasons, Twitter decides I’ve done something wrong, and suspends my account. All my work is lost.
What are my legal rights? Who owns those tweets? Can I get them back?
In Twitter’s terms of service, under a section called, “Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours)”, they state:
We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.
We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.
That’s fine, but under “General Conditions”, they also say:
We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.
We’ve seen this happen before with accounts such as the fake Christopher Walken. The reasons for the suspension of that user were fairly clear, but what about all those tweets that he wrote? They’ve also been removed without a trace. The account had a loyal and amused following, and those tweets were funny and had value.
Twitter doesn’t provide any kind of backup service within the site; external ways to ‘save’ your tweets exist, but they’re more than little crude. The majority of tweets are, of course, hardly worth keeping forever, but some are. And I can see many instances in the future where Twitter will be used for different purposes and more and more of these tweets will have value.
One obvious example is where Twitter breaks a news story before anywhere else because the submitter was on the scene when it took place. That tweet becomes a source – who does it belong to?
Moreover, say Twitter decides to produce The Book Of Tweets, and selects 10,000 of the greatest-ever updates for publication. Can they do that without the permission of the authors? Can anybody do that without permission of the authors? Where is the line?
This is a very hazy area and my gut feeling tells me that until a legal precedent is set it’s going to remain that way. Until then, you might want to think about it a little – who owns your tweets? And would you be happy for somebody else to make money off them without your permission?
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In Soviet Russia, your Tweets own you.
What about updates leak to twitter from identi.ca? dents (posts on identica) are covered by creative commons.
Doesn’t it depend on what legal responsibilities they want?
If they want the responsibilities of a content producer, then they can claim ownership of all the tweets. In that case, we are all just voluntary contributors to the Tweet content machine.
If, however, they want to be regarded as a simple publisher, and only a carrier of content. They have to grant ownership to somebody else, most likely the account owner. In that case, they could still reserve the right to suspend or cancel an account. but they would have to allow you to download your tweets, even if they are no longer visible at Twitter.com.
Their terms of service would seem to indicate the second case. If they’re not letting you download your tweets, then let me help you yell at them to see if we can get them to change that policy.
what about RSS? Couldn’t you just get your twitter feed via RSS, and download all of the entries from there?
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The scenario you describe (typing a book into Twitter, then having your account suspended) doesn't demonstrate the copyright on the tweets.
Let me pose you an alternate scenario: If you write a book, down by hand on sheets of paper without taking a copy, then mail your book to me without keeping your own copy, do I get your copyright? Of course not! You would still retain copyright over the work, but if you sent me your only copy, that's your fault. It's not my responsibility to mail it back to you.
If you were saving your tweets to a text file while you were tweeting them, you would have a copy.