I didn’t know you could copyright “asinine”.
by schwim on Mar.31, 2009, under Miscellaneous
A debate has sprung up concerning whether Twitter posts should be protected under copyright.
For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure of coming across it, Twitter is a micro-blogging system in the fact that you are only allowed 140 characters per post.
To put this into perspective, the previous sentence exceeds Twitter’s post restriction. It’s got 25 characters too many.
On the front page of Twitter, they have quotes from really important people that you should try to emulate, telling you what a great thing Twitter is.
From : Eric Nuzum, Author of The Dead Travel Fast
If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.
Eric obviously doesn’t follow the tweet(what they call a Twitter post. I always thought “twit” was more applicable.) format, as his accolades tip the scales at a hefty 210 characters. These two sentences could not be on his Twitter feed.
Need more info about it? Read Twitter’s own blog. That’s right, a blog. They don’t use Twitter to tell you about Twitter.
Let’s look at some of the random posts on Twitter today(I swear to God that I didn’t pick the most asinine of the group, these are first come, first serve using a search for “i”):
its raining… i need to invest in an umbrella soon. sigh…
OMG BANANA BREAD! I love my coworkers. ^__^
I hate my computer.
If I reach 2000 followers today, 2 lucky people will receive a brand new 80GB PS3. Please RT
So the big question is this: Should these be protected under copyright law? Should “OMG BANANA BREAD!” or “i need to invest in an umbrella soon. sigh…” have the same protection as “The Great Gatsby” or “Atlas Shrugged”?
I’m sure the authors of the above works think so. After all, they think so much of themselves that they don’t doubt for a second that your day is incomplete until you know their official stance on banana bread.
Twitter is to the written language what “Guitar Hero” is to a musician. An affront.
For those of you more accustomed to the Twitter format, I’ll be happy to condense this into a tweet.
OMG I’m so bitchy today. BRB I gotta take a dump.
