Who owns your Twitter updates?

Last September, there was this commotion at Twitterland brought about by changes in Twitter’s Terms of Service (TOS).

As we saw it, the issue mainly revolved around ownership of users’ tweets.

One criticism hurled at Twitter was something like:

If Twitter can do what they want with ‘our’ tweets, including reproduction for their own (financial) gain, what do we actually ‘own’?”… “If Twitter loses our data, closes our accounts or goes out of business, do we still own those tweets? Or are they retrievable in any way?”

Our was that, although the Twitter-ers retain copyright to their tweets (or updates), Twitter is justified in claiming re-publication or reproduction rights to the content. This is a standard practice among publishing websites.

Recently, we had another look at this issue to find out if there were any major changes or modifications to the TOS on account of the concerns raised by Twitter-ers.

That TOS version which was “questioned” by Twitter-ers is now archived as version 2. The replacement, and the current, version was made effective September 18, 2009.

Being long documents, we had difficulty comparing the two sets of TOS. At the end, we concluded that there are no major differences between the two documents.

We also checked the Twitter’s blog section. Was there a blog entry subsequent to the TOS 10 September 2009 which perhaps could give us an idea of any changes made?

We could not find any. So, that’s it. If ever the current version contains statements different from the TOS of 10 September 2009, we could only assume that the changes were not earth-shattering to warrant another blog entry or new announcement.

The position of Twitter as to its claim to having reproduction rights of the users’ tweets remains enshrined in the TOS.

*** The links to references in this entry may be found at (10 September 2001 TOS), (19 September 2009 and current version), and (Twitter’s blog section).

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