Have you ever taken a screenshot of a photo you saw on Twitter and reposted it somewhere as part of a blog post?

Well, you better think twice before doing THAT again because a judge just ruled that two news agencies should’ve asked permission before using an image tweeted by a photojournalist.

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Twitter has updated its copyright policy to allow for increased transparency when dealing with controversial and legally-ambiguous tweets. In order to keep account holders informed of their possible infringement, Twitter will now withhold tweets – instead of outright deleting them – if they face a copyright takedown complaint.
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It’s a good thing SOPA didn’t pass, or else over 4,000 Twitter users would be facing some serious legal troubles… and, in all likelihood, so would Twitter itself.
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The specifics on who owns what in social media has always been a little blurry, even when an attempt at clarification is provided.

For example, while Twitter is adamant that “they are your tweets and they belong to you”, they also state explicitly in their terms of service that when you sign up to the network you grant Twitter a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license” which allows them to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” those tweets in any way they see fit. Moreover, you also give permission that they can make those tweets “available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services.”

So, yeah, technically, while those tweets might belong to you, inasmuch as you can, uh, delete them anytime you like, that’s about the extent of your ownership. Twitter can do this and pretty much everything else. And more importantly, they’re making an income off of your content, too. As are Facebook and all the other giant social portals.

So remind us again exactly what it is that we ‘own’?

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In the Wild West of online content ownership, Twitpic – the popular photo sharing service for Twitter – has taken a stance in favor of content creators. It has updated its terms of service to explicitly state that “all content uploaded to Twitpic is copyright the respective owners.” We’ll see if other photo-sharing services follow suit.
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Twitter has asked LevelUp Studio to change the name of their newly released Andriod app, currently called “Touiteur”. The obvious reason is that, when said out loud, “Touiteur” sounds nearly identical to Twitter. We take a look at Twitter’s grounds for asking for the name change below.
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Twitter has announced some revisions to their terms of service (TOS). They’re largely unremarkable apart from this section about tweet ownership:

Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

This is a bit of a double-edged sword. Back in June I wrote about the mystery of tweet ownership and copyright and this update to the TOS from Twitter further clouds this issue. Two concerns remain:

1. If Twitter can do what they want with ‘our’ tweets, including reproduction for their own (financial) gain, what do we actually ‘own’?
2. If Twitter loses our data, closes our accounts or goes out of business, do we still own those tweets? Or are they retrievable in any way?

At this stage the responsibility for backing up our data rests entirely with us – although there is no way to restore this data on to Twitter should something bad happen – but the issue of who exactly owns what remains puzzling.

Consider this: on Twitter, when your account is suspended, or if you decide to delete your account, all your tweets are removed, too. (For example, there is no way to read @cwalken’s tweets on Twitter.com). If we, the users, collectively decided to delete all of our accounts together, at once, there would be no Twitter. There would be no tweets. There would be nothing. (Spambots aside.)

These are some of the reasons why I feel the issue of tweet ownership needs further investigation, and some debate. Transparency is absolutely key, and even with this revision everything still seems just a little too blurry for my liking.