soupsoup:

…There’s an iPhone app that aggregates news tweets from news services like CNN, AP, and BNO. BNO sells an iPhone app of their own to push breaking news alerts.

Anyone can aggregate the data you post on twitter, the question is, can they sell it?

Given this question involves the Internet and the Law, could you expect an answer other than “it depends…”? BNO’s in a tough spot:

1. The medium they’re known for, by design, produces units of content arguably too small for copyright protection: “short phrases or expressions are not subject to copyright protection. Even if [it] is novel or distinctive or if it lends itself to a play on words.” [US Copyright Office] Unless, maybe, they squeeze commentary into each 140 chars.


2. They are publishing facts; not eligible for copyright protection.

If the aggregators leverage a BNO trademark or brand for the profit (not just citing them, but calling their app, say, BNO Alerts) there could be an infringement claim. That’s unlikely.

My advice to BNO as a sometime-law-student non-lawyer is to

1. Start drinking heavily.
2. Couch news breaks with commentary, or tweet them as haiku so copyright vests.

Once copyrighted, calling aggregation fair-use could be contestable, especially if they pick up every tweet in BNO’s stream. (Even a few words from a tweet is a substantial excerpt, percentage-wise. Forcing the aggregator to parse out the facts from the presentation should be a sufficient deterrent.) Then you could lump BNO in with AP as content creators rather than just fact dispensers.

1. voltaicblueapples answered: bahaha haiku
2. squashed answered: Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Aggregation is a legal gray area. A collection of tweets is, unquestionably copyrightable.
3. hipsterdiet answered: Yea, these are good notes, fact is nothing legal in this space will move quickly. Tough spot.
4. infoneernet reblogged this from publiccommunication
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7. soupsoup reblogged this from boutofcontext and added:

   Thanks Chris, great points. I wonder if Apple would take a position in this case, if BNO asked them to remove the other...

8. billzilla answered: If it’s my tweets? Sure, good luck to ‘em.
9. publiccommunication reblogged this from boutofcontext
10. mills liked this
11. boutofcontext reblogged this from soupsoup and added:

    Given this question involves...Internet and the Law, could you expect an answer other than...

12. benjaminpalmer answered: maybe twitter should take a cue from flickr’s copyright tags
13. wreckandsalvage answered: I’d think so. Bloglines, Google Reader, Google News, etc
14. zigziggityzoo answered: This is like selling an app that gives google search results for a certain query. They aren’t copying content - just linking to it.
15. soupsoup posted this