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There's been quite a bit of talk about ChoiceTweets.com, which is a site that you can grab a person's tweet and have it printed on a shirt. You can grab any public tweet. Cool right? So here's the issue, tweets are copyrighted so this violates copyright laws. There's been some really angry people ranting about how the site should be shut down and alot of mean things have been said about ChoiceTweets. But really who should give a rat's ass? You're not stealing blog content, your not stealing their code, its a stupid tweet. But let me ask... Do you care if someone wears a shirt with your tweet on it? I sure don't. In fact let me buy you a shirt that says "Hey everybody, @LessAllan is so charming I wanted his name on my shirt! He's the greatest and oddly handsome too!" Want the shirt? Let me know.
So really when did we become so self-involved that we care about things like? Who or what taught us to be so uptight about such a legal clusterfuck? Why do we put up such a fight over the dumbest things? Point is, ChoiceTweets shouldn't be breaking the copyright laws but why do we care so much about it?
Related Twitter Links
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12 Responses to “Wear my tweet, I don't care!”
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It’s the whole “put my life out there on the internet” societal thing, isn’t it? Just as deep down everyone thinks he/she is an above-average driver, deep down everyone thinks the things they say and write are so enviably clever that some day they’ll be mondo-popular online and it will somehow matter if someone profits off them today.
Some people lack the ability to think for themselves and need everybody else to blindly follow society’s rules in order to feel secure. At least that’s my theory. I’m probably wrong. :)
The real issue is where do you draw the line if a “stupid tweet” is OK?
I don’t think you can draw a line once it’s been crossed. It’s like setting a precedent that it’s OK to abuse my rights, and profit from my work. So next it will be the code, and the blog content. After all, it’s just a stupid blog, just some stupid code.
You could allow someone to profit by giving them the right to do so, but he point here is that it’s your work and your choice.
It sounds to me as though you mostly agree on these things, you’re asking why people are so bent out of shape about it, yes?
Well if you don’t stand up for your rights who else will? Certainly this ends up with the mob mentality and some people push it too far. However, by downplaying the issue with a “what’s the big deal” attitude you actually make it worse by appearing as though you don’t understand that peoples rights are being trampled on.
You can’t eat sugar because it’s like setting a precedent that it’s okay. First it’s a soda, then a gallon of ice cream, then you’re sitting down with bags of sugar, weigh 500lb and have had 3 heart attacks in the last year.
And what about aspirin for your headache? Where do you draw the line if one is okay? I mean, if you can take one, why not the whole bottle?
I don’t think you can draw a line once it’s been crossed. (Does that sentence even make sense?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
@Brennan, @DG:
Standing at the top of a slippery slope is OK. Sliding down a slippery slope is not OK. The real problem with a slippery slope is that we (feel free to scope ‘we’ to anything you’d like that is bigger than ‘me’) are generally unable (usually due to lack of thought or social/political pressures) to keep from sliding, so we end up saying “stay of the mountain.” That is bullshit. We should have more strength/consideration/intelligence/wisdom to not need or allow absolute rules. (Except the one that says there should be no absolute rules.)
In a recent interview Charles Manson said he got his criminal start by Jay-walking. Oh that slippery slope!
I’m not arguing that we should stop this because it is a slippery slope, I’m attempting to use that slope as tool to show that everyone will draw the line at some point. (and I’ll freely admit that I didn’t do a great job of getting that across)
If you think tweets are “stupid” but code and blog content aren’t then you’ve made a decision as to what you are prepared to give away and want you will stand up for. That’s your choice under copyright law (but until you make it clear, no one should just assume it’s the case).
So the question was why does anyone care? Because they drew their line somewhere higher up that slope, and it got crossed.
Why does it bother you where other people draw their lines? No one is saying that you should feel outraged by this (or at least if they are I’ve not seen them, and they’re probably suffering from mob mentality).
In short: The slippery slope argument would be: Even though you don’t care about this, because of what could happen you should care. My argument is: If you can agree that at some point you would care, then you should accept that other people will, and do care about this now.
@DG,
I’m going go a step further and propose that twitter change their Terms of Service to state that anything posted to the public time line will be freely given to the world via an open source license (or something like that). I maintain that all public tweets are “stupid tweets” Let’s face it, no one is writing Shakespeare here. It’s only 140 characters. If you tweet it, you loose it.
steve
steve
I think that’s a terrible idea.
Copyright doesn’t care about the quality or the size of the work, and people not having a say in the matter is what the outcry was about.
Yes, if people agreed to a TOS saying their tweets would be open source they’d have no right to be upset at ChoiceTweets. Instead they’d be upset at twitter for changing the TOS…
It’s better to just give the choice back to the people. If ChoiceTweets had been opt-in from the start I don’t think there would have been a problem. I’d be all for it, and I’m glad they appear to be heading that way.
The argument that no one is writing Shakespeare is weak. Badly written blog posts are posted every day. Badly written code is written all the time. But you’ll determine that one thing is stupid and another is not?
So maybe you’re basing this on length? Poetry can easily fit within 140 characters, maybe that’s all stupid too? Hemingway’s shortest story in the English language is far less than 140 characters, potentially it was a throwaway line, but was it “stupid”? The RSA algorithm can be done in 147 characters, but I guess that’s 7 characters passed stupid?
The line of your argument is that tweets have no value. It simply isn’t a sold argument: if they truly had no value then no one would be able to make a profit from them.
The very nature of ChoiceTweets is to give some tweets value; shooting themselves/your argument in the foot.
@DG – “The very nature of ChoiceTweets is to give some tweets value” I want a shirt with that… may I?
Ha, yes you’re welcome to use the quote “The very nature of ChoiceTweets is to give some tweets value” on a T-Shirt as long as it’s attributed to DG. :)
If you want to buy it via ChoiceTweets, then I’ll be happy to tweet it when their opt-in system is in place.
@DG,
OK, how about this idea: If it doesn’t have an editing process then it isn’t protected by Copyright Law. So if you tweet something without having some other person read it, or do some sort of reflective editing yourself, it’s not covered. (Spell checking does not count.) How does that sound?