Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Twitter and Third-Party Streaming

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All my Flash Story tweets from Twitter have now been posted on Anonymous.

I have decided to leave creative tweets 1-212 on Twitter, but I won't be adding any more creative work there. By posting my work on my own site, I'm probably in a good position to defend my work against infringement.

Also, I have not copied the non-creative tweets (for example, announcements) to my blog; from an intellectual property standpoint, these are not of special concern.

I'm not upset with the good Twitter folks, but I do wish that they would add an opt-out option for third-party applications without requiring a member to go private.

After all, the whole point of Twitter is the possibility of a thread going viral, but allowing unknown (and sometimes untested) third parties to use someone else's creative work without permission creates a slippery slope practice.

Twitter ought to follow YouTube, which allows members to disable the video embedding feature. Thus, members still enjoy the public airing of their work but not the copying of it on outside sites.

For Twitter, I would suggest offering members the following options:

1. Granting a blanket Creative Commons license for unlimited third-party applications to stream content.

2. Granting a limited Creative Commons license that would grant limited streaming rights, only to Twitter and its approved subsidiaries and/or approved (tested) third parties, such as well-known rss feeds.

3. Granting no Creative Commons license, but still allowing the member to keep his/her account public.

4. Allowing the member to keep his/her account private, available only to followers.
In the meantime, creative writers need to read Twitter's Terms of Service before posting original poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and drama. Twitter has done a great job of presenting a clear (and fairly short) TOS page, and there is no good excuse not to read terms before agreeing to them.

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