Had you read the comments here, you wouldn’t have had to write your blog post. Although it is a nice post, and well-written.

You are an attorney and I am not, but your post, like the very similar comments it echoes here, does not prove that Tweets *are* copyrighted or *can be* copyrighted. It only proves that neither you nor I can make blanket assertions with as high a degree of confidence as my headline implies.

Some short statements can be copyrighted. I said so in my post and in comments and you say so (with greater authority) in your post.

Such copyrights *might* apply to certain statements published via Twitter. I agree with you.

Are all Tweets copyrighted upon publication? No one has proved anything like that. As I’ve said a few times here now, I think it will only be proven in case law.

http://www.95years.com/2010/02/26/can-you-copyright-your-tweets/

Based on that, I would guess that Schwartz’s haiku-tweet would be automatically copyrighted (or very possible for his legal representation to enforce copyright on, should he wish it), while your example tweet hopefully would not..

But IANAL and this is just a WAG and I don’t tweet so I don’t care :).

(But if I did I would do as you and assume that anyone might do anything with whatever I twat/tweeted.)

Copyright ©2010 by me.

The haiku is 62 characters, including punctuation.

If tweets are too short to copyright, but one wanted to keep one’s deathless wit off a T-shirt, just post monthly summaries of your Twitter feed as single blog posts. Even better, edit out the junk each month. Those “tweet-dumps” are certainly copyrighted, so quoting any part of them (beyond fair use) would be infringement. Including on T-shirts.

Archiving tweets is probably a good idea anyway, as they’re pretty ephemeral. And Twitter will go belly-up one day, as will we all.

Excellent points, Mike Dickison.

Conversely, if one wants to allow one’s Tweets to appear on a shirt, one can opt in. (All the companies I know of that allow you to put your favorite Tweet on a t-shirt will only proceed if the author of the Tweet grants approval.)

Can one phrase consist of three sentences and a haiku?

Excellent point! So maybe Circular 34 from the US Copyright Office doesn’t perfectly map to a Tweet, and this question will have to be answered in the courts. Until it is, some of us will guess that Tweets generally aren’t copyrightable and others of us will guess the opposite.

it sounds as though the W3C would consider putting it again later;

Right, they are.

but seeing as we’ve been waiting 10 years on CSS3 to be finalized, I would anticipate it the same way I’d anticipate California sinking into the Pacific Ocean.

Right you are! That’s the unholy tragedy of it.

you can STILL take some form of action. Here’s how…
Write to the tweeple who did not tweet yr name correctly. And ask them to include your name correctly within 24 hours. Failing which, you can make a report to Twitter. The thing is – it’s now all up to Twitter management to help put tweets back to the way they’re meant to be.

Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more

Can one phrase consist of three sentences and a haiku?

SpencerFromLegal has a good point. We all “signed” an agreement with Twitter to do XYZ with our tweets, so whether they are copyrightable is moot. We’re all allowing Twitter to do whatever their current terms of service say they can, including give them away to anyone who knows how to hook into the API.

My question now is, does this hold true with private tweets? Can (and does) Twitter allow the use of private tweets anywhere else? At least if my tweets were private, I’d know any republishing being done is by a real person (follower), which I’m totally cool with.

After all browsers except IE supported it, the W3C, in its wisdom, removed the element from the spec.

That’s a shame. To the aware designer, that could be a useful tool for maintaining usable and accessible highlighting colors. I can’t tell you how many times my choice of default highlight is nearly indistinguishable from some web design’s background color.

From the other source material, it sounds as though the W3C would consider putting it again later; but seeing as we’ve been waiting 10 years on CSS3 to be finalized, I would anticipate it the same way I’d anticipate California sinking into the Pacific Ocean.

Spend $100 on a copyright lawyer, and ask them to render an opinion of whether tweets are copyrightable.

Actually, we spent considerably more than that consulting an accomplished IP attorney on this subject. His legal opinion formed the basis for my post.

Might a different IP attorney come to a different conclusion? Certainly.

It’s been an interesting conversation, with reasonable and compelling arguments on both sides.

Thanks to some of you, my opinion on the subject is now less strident, or at least a more nuanced, than it was when I wrote this post nearly fifteen hours ago. I stand by my post but the subject is inconclusive (like most law).

Thanks, everyone!