Are Tweets Copyright- Protected?

Copyright and tweeting - the debate was bound to happen. Can repeating a message on Twitter - a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets) - actually be construed as copyright infringement? This article, by CONSUELO REINBERG, content editor, BP Council, was first published in the BP Council Notes, June 18, 2009.

A copyright debate that was already brewing positively boiled over when Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, was recently slapped with a US$25,000 fine by the National Basketball Association (NBA) for tweeting during a game about allegedly lousy officiating. What launched a thousand blogs about tweeting and copyright, though, was that ESPN republished his

Twitter feed - without his permission - further ticking him off and spurring him to add his two cents' worth to the debate. Were his tweets entitled to copyright protection? Can one copyright a tweet? The legal experts' answer to the first question: not a chance. And to the second: don't bother.

As new communication technologies emerge, so do new copyright infringement questions. But copyrighting a tweet would be a difficult-to- make and hard-to-enforce legal claim - for many reasons. Most tweets cannot be copyrighted because of size, content and scènes à faire issues.

Size - According to an Internet posting on blogherald.com by Jonathan Bailey, every time a new communication technology emerges, it shifts the copyright landscape, and new copyright issues that do not fit existing intellectual property (IP) standards arise. With Twitter, for example, while its terms of service clearly state that tweeters own anything they post on the service, the 140-char- acter limit to a Twitter post makes it almost impossible for the work to reach the level of creativity required for copyright protection. In the same vein, titles or short phrases usually cannot be protected since their length contributes to their lack of originality, as defined by copyright law.

Content - Lawyer Brock Shinen's article " Twitter- logical, The Misunderstanding of Ownership" ( canyoucopyrightatweet.com,) focuses on a salient point: facts are not copyrightable. And facts are what tweets are mostly about - from talking about the weather, to communicating what one had for dinner the night before, to complaining about the...