Technically, micro-blogging website Twitter, has been known to regard its users’ copyright grounds quite highly. But recent activity by the website, as observed by The Verge, seem to point out to the fact that the website is now taking the job a little more seriously than it was before. You can now copyright the jokes you tweeted on Twitter.
Seriously, we are not joking!
If you have composed an original joke, tweeted it on the platform and don’t want anyone else to steal it, you can report the theft to Twitter and the stolen tweets will be removed.
As spotted by @PlagiarismBad, a joke tweeted by freelance writer @runolgarun was copied by a few Twitter users and Twitter has taken those instances down, stating that the tweet is copyright of the original author. Olga Lexell, the original tweeter, is said to have reported the stolen tweet to Twitter. After the tweets were taken down, she confirmed that she requested their removal in the following tweet:
I simply explained to Twitter that as a freelance writer I make my living writing jokes (and I use some of my tweets to test out jokes in my other writing). I then explained that as such, the jokes are my intellectual property, and that the users in question did not have my permission to repost them without giving me credit.
There have been other tweets that were removed in the past because of similar instances, but this new event has surely caught everyone’s eye. Twitter clearly states its policies about plagiarism clearly in its copyright and DMCA policy.
Sure its hard to come up with a great tweet that can make you popular on the social network, but it seems that, according to Twitter, you can’t just copy and paste someone else’s tweet for that attention.
