Who Owns Your Twitter Postings

Twitter and Copyright

Most social networking sites either take possession of material you upload or leave you with the ownership but take almost total control.

If you post something you want to publish later on, you might have to pay the network to do so.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Levy on March 30, 2009 at 4:53pm

From Twitter's Terms...

Copyright (What's Yours is Yours)

1. 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.

2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

3. Twitter undertakes to obey all relevant copyright laws. We will review all claims of copyright infringement received and remove content deemed to have been posted or distributed in violation of any such laws. To make a claim, please provide us with the following:

a. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or the person authorized to act on its behalf;
b. A description of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
c. A description of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit Twitter to locate the material;

4. Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email;

5. A statement by you that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and

6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

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Permalink Reply by Maureen Sharib on March 31, 2009 at 6:02am

Steve, I'm glad you posted those terms as a snapshot in time. If Twitter turns out to be like almost every other social networking platform out there, those "terms' will change unilaterally on Twitter's "own" terms. In other words, what you agreed to WHEN YOU JOINED may well morph into some other Term of Service (TOS) as the network "matures". Ahem. If that doesn't look like a big juicy class-action lawsuit I dunno what does!
;)

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Permalink Reply by Steve Levy on March 31, 2009 at 6:15am

oh, so NOW you're an attorney too????

Maureen Sharib said:

Steve, I'm glad you posted those terms as a snapshot in time. If Twitter turns out to be like almost every other social networking platform out there, those "terms' will change unilaterally on Twitter's "own" terms. In other words, what you agreed to WHEN YOU JOINED may well morph into some other Term of Service (TOS) as the network "matures". Ahem. If that doesn't look like a big juicy class-action lawsuit I dunno what does!
;)

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Permalink Reply by Maureen Sharib on March 31, 2009 at 6:16am

I was thinking about adding "How to Copyright Telephone Names Sourcing" to my training repertoire.
;)
Happy Birthday!

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Permalink Reply by Recruiting Animal on March 31, 2009 at 6:40am

Happy Birthday, Vin Dieselevey! (And Maureen would make a very good attorney. In fact, don't know why her parents didn't push her in that direction).

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Permalink Reply by Steve Levy on March 31, 2009 at 6:54am

Thanks Animal...do you know why men over the age of 50 who blog go by these silly names?

Recruiting Animal said:

Happy Birthday, Vin Dieselevey! (And Maureen would make a very good attorney. In fact, don't know why her parents didn't push her in that direction).

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Permalink Reply by Recruiting Animal on March 31, 2009 at 10:20am

Heather, I'm the doorman at a local genealogy society. Last week a member spoke about his research. He's a lawyer and brought the problem of content ownership to our attention.

He showed us the terms highlighting the significant words and phrases. He also gave instances in which the terms of service changed without notification (as if anyone reads them in the first place).

He also pointed out that some of social networks he was using are based in France so that if you want to dispute something with the network you have to take it up in a French court.

He seemed to think it was a big deal. You don't - which is interesting.