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Forever Young: How Your Tweets Are Being Preserved For Public Consumption

-- By JulianBaez - 16 Apr 2010

What We Were Told

Your Twitter account is public by default. You see an interesting news story on healthcare reform and punch out a reaction in a minute. “Democrats are doubling the deficit and enacting a government take over of #healthcare,” or “Republican #HCR filibuster = 30 million Americans sentenced to death or bankruptcy.”

Your followers, all friends you know personally, see the tweet on their mini-feeds. In 12 hours, it’s no longer visible on your followers’ front pages. If any follower has your tweets forwarded to their phones, it’s in their inbox. As soon as it’s deleted, your tweet is gone (although possibly kept in a telephone company’s text message archive). In two weeks, you can’t even see your momentary reaction anymore. Or so we thought.

What’s Actually Happening

In the summer of 2009, the Library of Congress informed the public that it intended to compile all tweets related to Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, via twitter no less. This was part of the Library’s Web Archiving plan, originally intended to preserve primary source materials. On April 14th 2010, Twitter announced it would donate its entire archive of public tweets to the Library: “Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used [sic] for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.”

But what use is information in 2010 without a way to quickly search it? Google replay will allow users to search which tweets publicly available on a specific date and time. Eventually, “it will reach back to the very first Tweets every created.” Your instantaneous reaction will become instantaneously searchable ad infinitum.

The Law

Copyright

Intellectual property rights in blogs and tweets is a newly emerging legal question which courts have yet to address. The blogosphere has noticed. The prevailing opinion is the majority of tweets are not copyrightable because they are not original works of authorship, do not reach the requisite level of creativity, and are simply too short to register. Unlike similarly succinct haikus (tweets are 140 characters and haikus are 17 syllables), most tweets are simply statements of fact, making them not copyrightable.

Twitter’s terms of use relinquish any intellectual property rights in the material posted on the service and claim the copyright remains in the hands of the posting user. Therefore, the Twitter Corporation would not have a claim against the Library of Congress. The blogosphere consensus maintains that about 90% of all tweets are non-copyrightable statements of facts and references to other facts. Although the specific way of expressing facts has copyrightable potential, 140 characters and common knowledge ideas significantly limit the opportunity for original expressions. Most bloggers also believe the chances of individuals pursuing copyright infringement claims of their tweets are slim to none.

Privacy

Copyright law is not the only concern. There’s also the matter of privacy.

The Consequences