May 18, 2010
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Twitter the evil Piracy Promoting Plagiarism Platform
So the other day I heard a story about a company that got into some serious trouble. The whole web society came down on them like a ton of bricks and rightfully so. Their crime? They created an aggregation service that took the full content from blogs and websites across the web displayed them in full on their site.
Clearly this is horrible. I mean, that company was effectively stealing other people’s content and using it to expand their own advertising revenue! Plagiarism! Piracy!! Never mind that full attribution was given to the original content producer and a link was posted back to the originator’s site. Small consolation for the writer who has their words cruelly seized by a vile company that has no sense of basic web ethics!
The company changed its tune and made it so that only excerpts of the original works appeared in the aggregation and that the link back to the original site was made bigger and bolder and more visible. This, the web powers that be, grudgingly decided was acceptable.
But should they have? Actually Google got into trouble for the same thing and still gets a lot of heat over its Google News service which provides excerpts and its Book scanning project which only provides excerpts when the copyright status cannot be determined. Both are examples of content theft to enrich Google’s coffers. The fact that the company restricted their theft to “mere” excerpts shouldn’t immunize them from critique.
And that brings me to twitter! Really, how horrible is twitter with regard to this? Every single time someone Re-tweets a tweet aren’t they doing exactly the same thing? The re-tweet is taking someone’s original copyrighted material, copying it to your own feed, and spreading it amongst your own followers. Doing so increases the value of your twitter account. If you then have other links on your twitter to resources that earn you revenue, it could easily be said that you are stealing that person’s content for your own gain. DESPICABLE!
Some say, “oh chill out! It’s just 140 characters”. But what difference does its small size really make? Someone could easily come up with a really awesome, incredibly entertaining statement in 140 characters. Something of extreme popularity that just naturally draws in lots of new viewers and followers wherever it is posted. Not only that someone could make a tweet that reveals some kind of deep original thought, a new invention or a new idea. For example, suppose Einstein had tweeted out E=mc2 back when he was first thinking about it. Is it not conceivable that someone could retweet it and then beat Einstein to the punch in writing an awesome physics paper showing how it works and then proclaim that they were simply “inspired” by Einstein’s tweet but that they did all the real hard work to prove it true? Surely in such a situation, the retweeter did Einstein a grave wrong by stealing and re-tweeting Einstein’s original content.
Following this logic to the natural conclusion we cannot help but draw the conclusion that Twitter inherently promotes piracy and plagiarism in its users. Every single RT or MT is an act of grotesque piracy. We should send DMCA take down notices to all of them. Worse, when Twitter created the Retweet button they became not just piracy and plagiarism promoters but also enablers. Their platform became a tool for piracy and should be shutdown on those grounds in exactly the same way Napster was shutdown by enabling its users to pirate music mp3s.
By our great and all perfect and flawless 21st century legal theories of copyright it’s clear what must be done. Twitter must immediately remove the retweet button. Further them must remove any Retweet not done with the original tweeter’s explicit permission given prior to the retweet. Lastly twitter must compensate tweeters for their stolen tweets using whatever advertising revenue they’ve obtained from the twitter service.
I can’t see how anyone could possibly see things differently.
Comments (7)
is this sarcastic? sometimes your tone seems like it is, but I’m bad at picking up on that on the internet
@jenessa1889 - lol. hmmm guess I have to work on my sarcasm skills. I just tagged it. Hopefully that will help.
@nephyo - oh lol. b/c i can kind of see the point in both directions, so I wasn’t sure.
Yeah, I was the same way. “This has to be sarcasm, but, but maybe its not.”
But if you were serious Twitter could just add something like “You agree to let anyone and everyone retweet anything you tweet without legal compensation.” to the user agreement.
@jenessa1889 - The point I was trying to get at was that the way we think about these issues is extremely short sighted. We are too quick to call plagiarism and piracy when the nature of the technologies themselves inherently encourage excerpting, linking, copying, modifying and repeating. But if we have an absolutist view of what constitutes content “theft” we end up with absurd propositions like the idea that we should ban the “re-tweet”.
We’re all very hypocritical about the way things work right now. We apply rules and the law when we think it makes sense and let other examples slide through. At some point we’re going to have to actually dig down and look at the laws themselves and see what actually makes sense and what doesn’t.
@The44thHour - I don’t think Twitter’s terms of service can give other people the right to your content not even with your consent. They can and do include terms that require you to give THEM rights to copy and reproduce your content however they choose without compensation. All of the major platform sites do that like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. They shield themselves from liability in that way. The boundaries between them making a copy and a user making a copy are kinda fuzzy.
But even if they could, I don’t think it solves the core problem. It just hides the problem away in the TOS that nobody actually reads. It would make it so you just say “too bad Einstein. Your fault for putting something valuable on twitter!”
But maybe that’s the way it should be. Social conventions might be a better way to manage our understanding of reproducibility in content than strict legal rules. My guess is that those conventions have to be a lot looser than they are now so that web innovation can proceed more fluidly.
@nephyo - hmmm, that makes sense.
The only way to keep anyone form copying something is not showing it to anyone. Then the point for art diminishes.