Book published using tweets without permission, backlash ensues
amazon.com
amazon.com
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/508615417/regret http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511063886/tweets-are-not-no... http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511314674/dollar-sign-paint...
This is a mann who gives away most of his life's work. He loves fair use and believes in sharing. However, when doing so, he believes that he has control over what of his work is shared and under what terms. Publishing a book and charging money for other people's work without their permission is emphatically not fair use.
Anyway, he writes well on the subject, I would recommend reading his perspective because he is someone who makes a living giving away most of his work and had thought a lot about what that means.
1) He makes the argument that he has some natural right to control the entirety of his creative output. In the US (where he lives), this is not true, it has never been true, and we can all hope it will never be true. This statement, as an example, is complete nonsense: "I control every fucking syllable of anything I’ve ever done, regardless of whether I sell it or not." He has the copyright to some of the the work he's done, which is a completely different (and much less powerful) animal.
2) Except for the parts about him giving away most of his work, his posts could have been written by the PR departments of the RIAA or MPAA. He repeatedly talks about stealing, and the poor artist being hurt by the pirates, when no theft happened. Why doesn't he just talk about copyright infringement?
3) He talks about fair use and licensing, but the salient point is that he likely never had copyright on the tweets in the first place. If something is in the public domain, fair use and licensing never come into play.
Because when some dick weed uses and sells my stuff without permission, I seldom lose anything more than theoretical (non-)money from a junk project that’ll be forgotten in a month or two. Whatever. Happens every day. Don’t care. Nope.
But. When somebody creates the indelible impression that I relinquished control of my work in the service of that complete piece of shit when I did not? Well. That, to use an old publishing term, is fucking bullshit.
This is exactly how I feel when I see "blog comments" that are actually just scraped from comments on other sites (like HN). It's not that I want compensation at all: I just don't want my name and words attached to something I had nothing to do with, and it's infuriating that there are so many people out there who feel entitled to do exactly that just because I happen to have put some words on the internet without asking for money.
Yes Merlin, your tweets are 'nothing', and your window is not broken, any more than a photograph of your window from the sidewalk would have been forbidden by copyright. I'm afraid I am classifying all the hullabaloo over this as pure poutrage.
You can't measure value by size.
The standard definition of what's copyrightable is based upon creativity. So the shortest expression of a statement of fact is unlikely to enjoy copyright due to it's lack of creativity. But even a single worded creative expression on the other hand would likely enjoy protection (reasonably I believe).
Remember that copyright is unlike patent or trademark law, in that if two people independently come up with the same creative work then they'll both own the rights to it.
I'm a strong advocate of fair use (in that I've actively been involved in political lobbying on the issue). But there's no fair use case here, taking an entire work of creativity (a "tweet") in it's full and reproducing it for commercial gain just isn't fair use.
You could argue that there's been an implicit agreement on the authors part to allow redistributing (i.e. re-tweeting), and indeed such an argument has been used successfully historically in comparable situations (i.e. Usenet)
There's a reason why quote compilations don't get their publishers sued... by famous people, who actually say serious and meaningful things. When the twitter shirt debacles happened, quite a lot of lawyers came forth to give their opinions that tweets are simply too short to constitute original works.
Repeating someone's tweet is no more copyright violation than quoting Hemmingway's 6-word novel, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." And a damn sight less moving, I bet.
Oops, I copyrighted violated again.
And I bet Hemmingway never ran a Tumblr full of somebody else's photos. And quotes. And videos.
What we're seeing with the "outrage" over the book is not anger at being quoted, which of course happens all the time (and is perpetrated by the twitterers in question) -- but the sneaking suspicion that SOMEBODY IS MAKING MONEY!
Which, of course, is faintly ludicrous.
The difference between a tweet and Hemmingway's 6-word novel is that he could (and did IIRC) make money off of it.
Does it mean if we can compress a text to below a certain size it stops being copyright ?
The international convention is on originality/creativity - the US copyright office has taken the stance that the creativity requirements can't be met by short phrases.
But many courts around the world have provided rulings based upon the same international conventions protecting snippets of text. For example 11 words were considered protectable in:
http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/gettext.pl?lang=en&...
Last year the Australian High Court rules that slogans were copyrightable:
http://www.simpsongrierson.com/assets/publications/oym/OYMAp...
In many country sports statistics are also often considered copyrightable, even though they contain even smaller amounts of information than a sentence of text.
Actually, in the US, meaningful short phrases sometimes can. Some guy (who's name currently escapes me) has had a court confirm his copyright on his epigrams (he sells books of them or somesuch).
http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/
Essentially, he says it's very unlikely. Perhaps if you write a short poem, it could be construed as copyrighted, but otherwise you don't have much of a chance.
The whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, which is frequently how copyright law views the use of small pieces. I can legally use someone else's artwork in a collage or in my own non-derivative work (although derivatives basically don't exist in artwork, but for the sake of argument they do as they are still legally recognized) and I am at no legal risk because my collage of 1,000 pieces of artwork creates a whole new piece of art in itself.
The book in question is likely a lazy assed crowdsource, likely much of which was written by average Joe's. However the real question here regardless of country is did the author make something new in their book? I remember reading a correspondence book that mixed multiple anonymous letters together to create a chapter, but no two were destined for the same person and it completely cleared any question of copyright infringement, however I doubt this book of tweets was artfully crafted together to evade copyright on the merits of its own work. From what I read of it, its simply hoping to avoid copyright on the duration of material, which it is likely going to do but legally speaking it shouldn't if it really is a lazy crowdsource compilation.
Nope, that's not coming out quite right.
I dunno, where does the triviality boundary lie? If I put together green shirt and blue jeans, do I now "own" the style for having invented it? Surely not.
Maybe grellas will enlighten us on how long does a work has to be before it's considered "an original work".
1) A tweet is no different than an email sent to the entire world. Like an email, if you want to protect the contents, you should include a disclaimer.
2) A tweet is a small blogpost, subject to the same content ownership rights.
I think that the length of the tweets also comes into issue here. Tweets can only by 140 characters long. If I made a book that was a compilation of 140-character quotes from blog posts, would I fall into the same issues? Can I not use a tweet as a quote under fair use just because 140-characters is also 100% of the content, and not just a portion of the content?
Some commentary and the author's apology letter can be found here: http://techdirt.com/articles/20100412/1844038986.shtml
In 10 years of using Amazon intensely I've never seen such an overwhelmingly negative response!
If your blog quotes from and links to my blog, that's an endorsement, and I would probably be happy about it.
But if you print out my blog and sell it on Amazon, I would definitely be pissed off.
Some behavioral economists say that people operate in two modes: A "warm and fuzzy reciprocity" mode used with friends/family/neighbours/colleagues and a "coldly calculating market" mode used whenever there is money involved.
If you collect a few entertaining tweets and publish them on your blog, most people would probably consider it within the spirit of reciprocity - it's a shared resource with no specific owner.
But by selling the collection, you are breaking the implicit social contract that governs reciprocity and switching to market mode. In market mode I will obviously demand my fair share of the profits, and by not offering it you are breaking the social rules for market interaction as well. (See "thief" - exploiting other people's effort for profit and offering nothing in return.)
So yes, selling the book probably generates more anger than giving it away. But it's not much of a mystery why that is so, is it?
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7a3-_Y7...