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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

The terms in question:

"You may export or extract non-programmatic, GUI-driven Twitter Content as a PDF or spreadsheet by using "save as" or similar functionality. Exporting Twitter Content to a datastore as a service or other cloud based service, however, is not permitted."

So do I own my tweets or not? If I own them, can't I decide what to do with them, such as storing them in a cloud service? Twitter can't have it both ways.

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You own the content of your tweets. But you don't own the instance of the tweet that is stored in Twitter's database. They are are under no obligation to make it easy for you to save them ex post facto.

If you want to archive / cross-post your content you need to store it some place that you have ownership over. Whether than be a word document, spreadsheet, open source microblogging software, or whatever else, you shouldn't expect a media/advertising company to provide CMS features, that's not why they exist.

I'm working on a new service that archives users' data and I wanted to include their tweets. Now I'm unsure if I'm allowed to do that, even on the users' behalf.

You're not allowed to do that.

My thoughts exactly. Do I own my tweets or not? I don't see how having a service outbound my tweets anywhere would be a violation.

Is Twitter's policy that the users do own their tweets? I never heard that claim before. I would have assumed not.

You need to post them into a service that you have control over (maybe an open source microblog that runs on your server for example) and then cross-post into Twitter.

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