Twitter Takes Down Joke Stealers’ Tweets
Twitter Takes Down Joke Stealers’ Tweets
Why did the chicken cross the road? We’d tell you, but Twitter has withheld our punchline in response to a report from the copyright holder of the original joke.
Scratching your head? We don’t blame you. However, if you pilfer a joke on Twitter, and the person who created said joke notices, then they might have a good chance for a successful copyright claim against you. At least, that seems to be the case with one joke creator, freelance writer Olga Lexell, who reportedly had some success recently in taking down tweets from other Twitter users who copied her joke without any attribution whatsoever.
“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,” she said in a tweet. (Her account is now protected.)
This isn’t the first time that Twitter has removed tweets—jokes—based on copyright claims. However, the moves do open up two major questions: First, how does Twitter know that the joke in question really is an author’s own work? It’s a lot easier to figure out who owns a major motion picture, an app, or a game that might be the subject of a tweet promoting a free (illegal) copy. It’s a bit trickier to figure out whether a person tweeting a joke actually originated the humor, or whether they swiped (or modified it) from another source themselves.
(We’re not suggesting Lexell did that, but it does post an interesting predicament.)
There’s also the unfortunate complication that when these kinds of issues get publicized, it can create a bit of a wildfire that’s more troublesome to deal with than the original joke copiers. As Gizmodonotes, plenty of others are now taking the joke that Lexell originally posted—and others copied—and copying it themselves, as a sort of thumb-your-nose response toward the entire Twitter tweet takedown process. So, really, the takedown had the unintended effect of propagating the original issue even more.
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