Twitter Says Your Tweets Belong To You 102
CWmike writes "Twitter has modified its terms of service to state unequivocally that messages posted belong to their authors and not to the company. '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,' wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post Thursday announcing the modifications. Twitter is still hammering out a set of guidelines for developers on the proper use of the company's API. What do Twitterers think of the TOS changes? Barbara Krasnoff writes, ' Twitter announces new ToS. Tweeters shrug,' noting that some appreciated the company's transparency in contacting its users and pointing out the changes that were being made."
All your tweets are belong to you! (Score:5, Insightful)
CYA move (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like Twitter is trying to cover their butts.
"No officer lawman sir, That is not our terrorist message, and we don't have anything to do with it. All the messages belong to the person who wrote them."
Cake and eat it! (Score:3, Insightful)
If They Truly Belong To Me... (Score:2, Insightful)
When that happens then I'll say that they've told the truth.
Until that happens, they don't really belong to me.
Re:CYA move (Score:2, Insightful)
That way my immediate thought. It's a nice thing to do (compared to the "we own everything you type" option), but I figured this way simply because they are getting too many contacts from people's lawyers and want to put themselves in a position of lower risk.
Not that it stops screwballs from suing you. Google has been sued over stuff that has nothing to do with them because their search engine points to pages that say whatever.
Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you implying that you can't do that right now? What's stopping you?
Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a square deal as is. You get to keep the copyright for your "work", but you cede the rights necessary for Twitter to disseminate your thoughts. You don't cede them to anyone else, and Twitter can't sue you for reusing your deep thoughts somewhere else.
The ability to revoke your stuff would indeed be nice. But to say that without it the deal is meaningless is just lame.
Re:Your tweets belong to you but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Same as on /. Look down...
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 SourceForge, Inc.
Re:Your tweets belong to you but... (Score:5, Insightful)
we can do whatever we want with them....
What alternative do you suggest?
Option A: don't claim the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" tweets. Problem: publishing material on a website involves using, copying, transmitting, displaying, adapting, modifying and distributing it, so they would be infringing copyright and, sooner or later, get sued by some troll (in other news: Twitter operates in countries outside the US which don't have the same "fair use" clauses in their copyright laws).
Option B: claim ownership of everything. They could do this if they wanted to - nobody forces you to post your 120 character masterwork on Twitter.
Option C: lock out the public and pay professional twitterers to produce pithy and erudite tweets on a "work for hire" basis. Tempting, but I don't see the business model.
Your call.
Re:Your tweets belong to you but... (Score:5, Insightful)
we can do whatever we want with them....
What alternative do you suggest?
Option A: don't claim the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" tweets. Problem: publishing material on a website involves using, copying, transmitting, displaying, adapting, modifying and distributing it, so they would be infringing copyright and, sooner or later, get sued by some troll (in other news: Twitter operates in countries outside the US which don't have the same "fair use" clauses in their copyright laws).
Option B: claim ownership of everything. They could do this if they wanted to - nobody forces you to post your 120 character masterwork on Twitter.
Option C: lock out the public and pay professional twitterers to produce pithy and erudite tweets on a "work for hire" basis. Tempting, but I don't see the business model.
Your call.
D: Move the server offshore and pirate other people's work.
Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why whine? You can't retract your slashdot posts either.
Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... (Score:2, Insightful)
Except, once something reaches the internet proper the odds of removing all instances of it drop to near 0.
While this is true, this has nothing to do with Twitter! You could have set your account up as private, in which case it could not be scraped by people without your permission, thus generally fade from the caches of the Interwebs. Turns out its hard to get rid of anything. Shredded paper could be reconstructed. If someone really put their mind to getting your information, they probably could.
Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... (Score:3, Insightful)
When you write a book the content belongs to you, but you do not have the ability to recall and erase every copy of that book in print. Why should it be any different for electronic publishing, such as Twitter?
Re:CYA move (Score:3, Insightful)
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 SourceForge, Inc.
Re:Where is the money? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:CYA move (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like Twitter is trying to cover their butts.
"No officer lawman sir, That is not our terrorist message, and we don't have anything to do with it. All the messages belong to the person who wrote them."
They don't need that kind of CYA. None of the places that do claim to own everything you write are held accountable for that kind of thing. They throw in a few disclaimers, and at the end of the day they might be asked to take something down but they aren't going to be prosecuted for having hosted a terrorist message whether their TOS automagically claims ownership or not.
I think that they just realized that they can basically ask for every relevant right they need in their TOS anyway, so they can earn some cheap good PR with their users just by giving up on their plans to publish "The Poetry of Twitter" without having to pay any of the twit authors.
Re:If They Truly Belong To Me... (Score:3, Insightful)
thus generally fade from the caches of the Interwebs
All due respect to Vegas, what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet...