High Altitude Marketeering

Twitter has new terms of service out. While I have neither the patience nor the legal chops to parse the small print of the actual terms, I did read the overview, a post by founder Biz Stone on the Twitter blog.* Part of it reads:

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.

While I’m no IP lawyer, my business makes me conversant with copyright speak and this sounds an awful lot like a grant of copyright. The only thing missing in the laundry list of ceded rights is that of the right to claim authorship. Judging from the rest of the language, that is the only sense in which your words still belong to you.

Why care? Well, if you’re an outdoor brand or athlete streaming realtime tweets about an expedition, you’ve just granted Twitter as much right as you have to publish your story. You may have authored the words, but you’ve now given Twitter co-ownership, very different from what happens wher you just post the stuff to a blog.

* What’s equally interesting is that, if you read the actual terms, the Stone-quoted phrase doesn’t actually appear in the terms of service. Not sure what that means but It calls into question exactly what rights you’re really giving away. See for yourself: http://www.twitter.com/tos