Twitter: “All Your Tweet(s) Are Belong To Us.”
Twitter has announced some revisions to their terms of service (TOS). They’re largely unremarkable apart from this section about tweet ownership:
Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.
This is a bit of a double-edged sword. Back in June I wrote about the mystery of tweet ownership and copyright and this update to the TOS from Twitter further clouds this issue. Two concerns remain:
- If Twitter can do what they want with ‘our’ tweets, including reproduction for their own (financial) gain, what do we actually ‘own’?
- If Twitter loses our data, closes our accounts or goes out of business, do we still own those tweets? Or are they retrievable in any way?
At this stage the responsibility for backing up our data rests entirely with us – although there is no way to restore this data on to Twitter should something bad happen – but the issue of who exactly owns what remains puzzling.
Consider this: on Twitter, when your account is suspended, or if you decide to delete your account, all your tweets are removed, too. (For example, there is no way to read @cwalken’s tweets on Twitter.com). If we, the users, collectively decided to delete all of our accounts together, at once, there would be no Twitter. There would be no tweets. There would be nothing. (Spambots aside.)
These are some of the reasons why I feel the issue of tweet ownership needs further investigation, and some debate. Transparency is absolutely key, and even with this revision everything still seems just a little too blurry for my liking.
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After re-reading Twitter’s ‘Terms of Service’ (TOS), I do not think the change in the language regarding the “ownership of tweets” is anything to be unduly concerned about. In fact, I believe it was necessary for Twitter to make this change in order to clarify the relationship they have with users.
Twitter acts merely as a transmission service for messages (the content), a fact clearly acknowledged by Twitter in their TOS to be the property of the originating user, and from a legal standpoint because it is the property of users, they must be granted “express permission” to transmit and distribute the users’ property; hence the need for the license. In their TOS, they state:
“… you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) …”
This license that users grant to Twitter does not give them the right to do whatever they want. On the contrary, this license is restricted only to the activity they list in detail in their TOS, which basically revolves around the right to broadcast and distribution users’ tweets.
It is also important to note that the nature of the contractual relationship between Twitter and it’s users is a reciprocal one. In return, Twitter grants users a license use its services, which essentially is the right to use the software located on its servers. This license has some limitations, limitations that are listed in the TOS and which are primarily designed to curb abuse (e.g. spam) and to prohibit otherwise illegal activities (e.g. harassment, malfeasance).
And as you astutely point out, “If we, the users, collectively decided to delete all of our accounts together, at once, there would be no Twitter.” a potentiality that only reinforces the contractual relationship Twitter has with it’s users.