By its nature, Twitter is a very open and social platform for communication. Anyone is free and encouraged to tweet and retweet to his or her heart’s desire.
But what if you wanted to remix or republish a tweet outside of the service in a book, film or art project? (Not as strange as it sounds, as there are already a number of books available on topics like how to use Twitter as a marketing tool.)
Andy Clarke, a Web designer and author based in the U.K, stumbled across this problem, and launched a site this week that allows Twitter users to declare creative commons licenses on their Tweets and avatars.
Clarke wanted to use real user content in a new DVD tutorial on web design, but his publisher needed permission from every user. He initially crowd-sourced volunteers on Twitter with hash tags for anyone who granted him usage, but thought there might be a better way.
"A lot of people might think, ‘Yeah they’re worthless, so you can do what you like with them.’ But from an author’s point of view — and a publisher’s point of view most importantly — it’s a huge gray area," he said.
TweetCC.com allows you to send out a tweet clarifying your desired license, and stores a database of users for reference.
"I think it’s the right time in the sense that collectively as more and more people get involved with this thing, the platform itself is going to be to home to a pretty substantial body of work," said Eric Steuer, Creative Director of Creative Commons, who’s been in discussions with Clarke about TweetCC.
By default users already own complete rights to their tweets, and Twitter’s terms of service reiterates this fact. It also goes on to encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.
"We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours," the document reads, but Twitter has yet to implement a Creative Commons function in itself.
The big question here is, how often beyond retweeting and news analysis (a favored but not absolute exception under fair use) would anyone even want to use or remix a simple 140 character piece of text?
Third party apps like TwitPic have their own TOS and copyright policies, so linked multimedia doesn’t apply. (TwitPic, like Twitter, grants a user full ownership of content.)
As the site grows, people are finding more creative ways to use the service (haikus, piecemeal novels, lines of code, etc..) and their tweets are saved on the page as long as their account is active.
Another key demographic who might someday be concerned with how their work is being used, are celebrities like Stephen Fry whose tweets are more entertaining than "I am drinking coffee." As with any new medium there are new legal questions.
Mark Fischer, a Boston-based copyright lawyer with Fish & Richardson P.C says that while copyright law doesn’t protect short phrases per say, there are exceptions, like poetry or multiple tweets as a collective body of work.
"It’s a really great idea, but I’d say for many of the tweets it’s not necessary," he said of implementing Creative Commons.
He’s also not aware of any litigation thus far over the copyright infringement of a tweet, but thinks that such a suit would –of course- likely draw lots of media attention.
