Can you Copyright your Twitter Stream

Jason Calcanais posted on twitter the question “Question of the day: Can you copyright your Twitter stream? Can anyone republish anyone’s twitter stream? Thoughts?” It is an interesting idea, how ephemeral is 140 words or less, and if they are pulled and reproduced like in the image below, who owns what? Does it in the longer run really matter?

One of the reasons that this is a good question, is that with passage of the Pro-IP act, the way that the DMCA has been subverted for illegal take downs (with evidently no back action on that issue), and the host of other copyright issues that seem to be touching on everything we do, someone coming along and copyrighting their twitter stream is not far fetched.

The idea of ownership, what we own, and what we don’t own, we merely rent is as complex and as convoluted now as they have ever been. America was built on piracy, the theft of intellectual property is a time honored tradition since the start of the country. China is now doing a one over on America, and building their country on the time honored tradition of IP theft. What we can’t create we steal. Been that way for a while now.

This brings us back to twitter stream and copyright. I like the question, but evidently this answer does not fit into another twitter stream, it is more pontificating on the idea. If Jason copyrights his question, which he can do, with or without merit, as well as all the answers that I screen capped above, who owns that? Does it matter?

Yes it does matter, because no one wants to be sued for doing something, while I am taking the question and running with it, at this point with blogging, and RSS feed scraping, and the host of other ways that the content off by pro and personal blog are used, the effort that I would have to go into policing the use of the stuff I write is well beyond me, and the recovery of any money would be pretty slim.

Add to that the twitter stream, and no one single person could hope to police the Internet for their own content, in or out of context. The copyright would not matter, the words will move too fast onto other sites, which would cause a logistical nightmare, huge costs, and little recovery. I know this sounds like the MPAA/RIAA copyright terrorism, but if we end up there with twitter, what a waste of time, resources, and people to hunt down 140 words or less.