Twitter Thread Compiler Apps and Copyright Ethics
erynnbrook.com
erynnbrook.com
This is literally what twitter is.
> No, I don’t like screenshots of my threads being reposted on Facebook or Tumblr. I don’t like my tweets appearing in ad-filled listicles that someone got paid to write.
If you're going to speak publicly, and say something that attracts interest, this is inevitable. As shitty as "twitter journalism" is, at least they're providing correct attribution to the original author. This is how online discussions work, and I think that a rule that says you're not allowed to quote other people would be harmful to society.
Perhaps technically, but I think by "aggregate" she means by crawling, rather than places where people post themselves.
> I think that a rule that says you're not allowed to quote other people would be harmful to society.
Actual journalism, which just quotes parts or mentions the content in order to comment upon it (like you did), is very different from what she's criticizing, which is wholesale copying without any further purpose.
When you press “tweet” on Twitter you give Twitter consent to display your words on their website, unlike the compilers which will display it without consent
You grant [them] a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.
https://twitter.com/en/tos Emphasis mine.
The permission you give Twitter also extends to thread compiler apps, to whatever extent Twitter feels like sublicensing.
But yes, if you're writing on twitter, you are giving them permission to use your content.
But does Twitter sublicense? Why would they want to support usage of a third party service?
Of course that's one of the first edits that will be made: removing the credits. Especially when they're placed unobtrusively like in the example.
I do want to note something, though: the author uses some loose wording when mentioning the change to "copyright" the example image, but that's a little misleading: it was copyrighted the moment it was made, even without having the notice. A notice can still be a good idea for various reasons but I wouldn't be too worried about it, honestly.
Actually exercising your rights could be a fraught process for all sorts of reasons but you do have the option.
On the other hand, and maybe this misses the point entirely, I absolutely loathe Twitter threads. I wish every time someone felt compelled to write "Here's a deep and insightful look at that thing you read me to find out about. /thread," the word "thread" would be replaced with a link to a long form post even if it had the same words. Part of it is Twitter's UI ("oops, page reloaded, back to the top you go") and part is
that it is
a little maddening to
read thoughts br
oken up into smaller
chunks and not
paragraphs.
That said, I agree more with my first paragraph than my second so I get it, and perhaps if I can't follow or respect the creator's wishes in how to consume the content that he or she created in the manner it was created, maybe I shouldn't consume it at all?
I strongly disagree. While I also think that creators should be compensated for their works (for a limited time), after they get said compensation, they should get no say in how you consume the content, or what you do with it (with the obvious exception of making it available to others).
We need universal basic income alongside the abolition of intellectual property law.
IP laws were meant to incentivize individuals to work for the benefit of the society - not to protect individual's abilities for getting passive income ad infinitum.
Another part is trademark law. It should not be possible for e.g. coca cola to make Pepsi cans with horrible tasting drinks inside.
However, most of Patent law, and a lot of Copyright law should be scrapped.
The social norm against plagiarism is plenty strong.
It's so strong, in fact, plenty of people think copyright law prohibits it.
https://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
> Another part is trademark law. It should not be possible for e.g. coca cola to make Pepsi cans with horrible tasting drinks inside.
And this is why trademark law shouldn't have been swept up under the illusory banner of "Intellectual Property" to begin with: Rightfully considered, it's a consumer protection law, not a property law.
I'm pretty sure that falls more under fraud than it falls under trademark violation.
We're talking about twitter posts. This stuff has incredibly low value on its own. Viral content really only exists because it is all free and very easy to consume. Unfortunately, twitter and others(Facebook, instagram etc) do a lot of tricks to fool people into believing the content they post is valuable. So people start to think their post that received X amount of like or views is actually valuable. This is why people get so upset about seeing their content used elsewhere. Because they've been foolded into believing it has significant value. The reality is that it does not.
(I do strongly get behind the idea that falsely claiming credit for the creative work of others is immoral, but that's a different thing than being somehow "entitled" to compensation. That's a completely different animal to me.)
I love Twitter threads because if they’re done right (which is a big if, admittedly) then they’re equivalent to an annotatable essay: each fragment of the thread can be replied to individually.
The difference between this and a traditional annotation platform is that Twitter forces the author to choose the granularity of the annotations, rather than leaving it up to the annotators. (Unfortunately, a lot of people do a bad job choosing this granularity, probably because they don’t realize this is what they’re doing.) Also, since the replies are themselves tweets, the system has a fractal form, with the annotations themselves being annotatable.
The number one rule of writing Twitter threads: do not split sentences between Tweets. Hopefully one day this rule will be widely known and followed.
If you want to write longform, just write longform. If you want annotations, use software that actually has good annotating features and history tracking, such as google docs or maybe a paid alternative. Not twitter.
Does Twitter's terms-of-service mean that you've given away those rights to control how they're viewed or whether you're paid, though? (Not a rhetorical question.)
"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).
This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same... Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services."
So if we were to colonize Mars, Twitter wouldn't have rights to the content there? What about Earth orbit?
I suspect courts will interpret "worldwide" to mean "universal" if it comes up, as the intent seems clear.
In some of the follow-ups there are some more ethical compilers: https://bobbin.herokuapp.com/ stores nothing and uses twitter's embed functionality to link them together, and https://threader.app/ doesn't monetize content and is working to get better at supporting creators.
Thread compiler apps and sites on the other hand... well I'm a bit more torn there. On the one hand, yeah, I guess it's not right if you're just reprinting others' work without their permission. But at the same time, most of these services do let you embed content, and do have an API. Isn't that basically what they exist for?
And aren't you already not getting paid for your work by using these services? You're not getting paid for posting on Twitter.
Some writers are monetizing their Twitter threads. For example:
Or Twitter could allow content creators could charge a subscription fee to be followed. Creators could allow their tweets to become public after a configurable number of hours so non-subcribers could see what they're missing.
This all feels analogous to someone telling a joke to their friends. One of the friends taking the joke and claiming it as their own is a dick move, but we all accept that the joke was freely given away and that the other friends aught to be able to retell it without being forced to credit the original author every time they retell it (or pay them if they make money telling it at some point). It's an idea; once you freely enter it into the public sphere you don't and shouldn't have control or ownership anymore; it belongs to society.
2) They're different because they usually store and distribute her data somewhere other than twitter. If she deletes a thread, that copy persists. If people interact with that copy, she doesn't get to see or manage that. If it's through twitter's API, she can see interaction with her content and block people if they interact abusively. And third party clients generally don't profit off of individual threads.
https://bobbin.herokuapp.com/ is a compiler that is much more like a third party client; it all goes through twitter's API, and in follow ups she said it sounds fine.
Also, she didn’t seem to necessarily want money from them, but somewhat similarly to GPL’d open source projects, doesn’t like scrapers making money off of her work. Plenty of software devs license their work similarly to that as well, and it sounds reasonable to me.
However, I disagree on thread readers. They provide attribution to the author, so a reader has just as much opportunity to click through to the author's page as they would within the default Twitter client.
Yes the thread reader is getting ad revenue from displaying the content, but this isn't really money that the author would have seen anyway. If anything, Twitter is the one getting ripped off, so it's in their interest to improve the native thread reading experience, to capture back that lost revenue. The author says that they're not providing any added value, but I think their value is the improved readability of the thread.
Overall I think she's discounting the improved readability that these sites provide. She mostly just mentions that they improve shareability, which for me is a secondary benefit at best.
My intuition is "repackaging, redistributing, or transforming freely available things" isn't a problem. But trying to make money from it is.
I can understand it's a pain if you're producing content regularly which is well received, but you're not paid for it.
I think that parallels the open-software stuff at the moment. (Licenses and creative-commons seem analogous in this case).
I think that "Donate to my Patreon to support my content creation" has worked out okay, though. It seems to have given more people more money than they'd otherwise get from a "only consume if you've paid" model. (Although 'Patreon supported' doesn't solve the sleazy redistribute-with-ads).
The only way I could vaguely make sense of it is through thread-compiling clients. But I never found a good one for Linux. Is there one?
But websites that compile Twitter threads, and then serve them via apps, with ads? That's just fucking insane. I mean, just put the bloody thread compiler on Github ;)
I'm surprised by the sympathy I'm seeing for this position. You people know that she is effectively complaining about fair use, right? This is not something that can be budged on, even in deference to the feelings of a "writer/feminist/educator". Fair use is the only thing that stands between us and massive intellectual property cartels guiding the public consciousness through selective enforcement. Wanna go back to network television? Because this is how you do it.
BTW... She is using a still[0] from a video that CNN owns the copyright to, and section 3 of their tos[1] explicitly forbids doing what she is doing - with the unnecessarily stated exception "as otherwise expressly permitted under copyright law". You really want to take that exception away from her? I can pretty easily argue that her use is transformative, can you? How does this differ from what she is complaining about?
[0] http://www.erynnbrook.com/white-feelings-for-charlottesville... [1] https://www.cnn.com/terms
And btw, the Prince case is illustrative because the judge ruled that some of his pieces were transformative, but others were not, walking that gray line.
The default is for works to have an automagic copyright so you have to give it away (though a permissive license or public domain if your country supports that concept) else nobody can legally share it.
Think what she meant to say is she should have put her name on it so she got some interweb points.
In the case of twitter, there is no equivalent for a per-account "robots.txt" and issues like this arise where you can't take your content back once it's copied. Twitter thread compilers should regularly check whether a tweet has been removed etc to turn into a cache and avoid these situations.
Then her name would be connected to a silly joke forever.
That ought to be fair under copyright law.