WASHINGTON — Don’t you hate when you craft a witty, concise tweet and someone else copies and pastes your material and tweets it as their own?
Twitter doesn’t like it, either.
The micro-blogging giant periodically flexes its copyright muscle, when users complain that someone is using their copyrighted material without credit.
Before you worry that your next response to a joke violates copyright law, here’s the deal — the safest way to share someone else’s funny, clever, or moving tweet, while giving appropriate credit is to hit Retweet.
This week, @PlagiarismBad noticed that Twitter deleted at least five tweets that copied a joke by @runolgarun that read:
saw someone spill their high end juice cleanse all over the sidewalk and now I know god is on my side
— uh (@runolgarun) July 9, 2015
I don’t get it either, but that doesn’t matter.
According to The Verge, L.A. freelance writer Olga Lexell appears to be the first to publish the joke on Twitter. In another tweet, she confirmed she filed a request to have the tweets removed.
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.
Coincidentally, a San Diego man has filed a lawsuit against Conan O’Brien, TBS, and others on the funnyman’s team claiming jokes he’d tweeted ended up in O’Brien’s monologue.
In a statement, O’Brien’s production company says there is no merit to the lawsuit.
Anyone on Twitter can submit a copyright claim through Twitter’s web form. If it decides to follow through, the offender’s tweet is replaced with “This Tweet from @(Twitter handle) has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder.”
Twitter also publishes requests made under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — or DCMA — on the website Chilling Effects.
Twitter declined to respond to The Verge’s report.