All by Pia

Does Twitter own my posts

A long reply to a short question:

She’s referring to Section 4 of the Twitter Terms of Service, which states, among other things:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, Retweet, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, is made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services as the use of the Services by you is hereby agreed as being sufficient compensation for the Content and grant of rights herein.

Short answer: Twitter can basically do whatever it wants with your content.

Long answer:

There’s a legal concept of a “bundle” of property rights, conceptualized as a bundle of sticks. If you OWN property, whether tangible or intellectual property, you have every stick in the bundle. And you can give permission to other people (i.e., a LICENSE) to share individual sticks in the bundle.

The bundle of rights includes the rights to view, copy, modify, share, adapt, publish, display, and sell the property.

You own intellectual property, meaning you hold the copyright and the entire bundle of rights, once you commit it to a tangible medium. That means as soon as you write something down — or post it on Twitter — you are the owner.

As the owner, you have the right to grant licenses to others, meaning you’re giving them permission to use your intellectual property in certain ways. By default, a license is limited to the rights that you explicitly include. So if you give someone a license to view and copy your writing, it does not allow them to share, modify, or publish it. That’s why you’ll see those long sentences with lots of verbs in legal documents; they’re enumerating the specific rights given to the licensee.

According to Twitter’s Terms of Service, as soon as you type content into Twitter, you are both the owner of that content, AND you’re granting a license to Twitter. And look at that litany of rights you’re granting — “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute.” Basically everything.

So how can Twitter get away with this? If you ask their lawyer, you’ll probably get a response that’s something like: Twitter provides a platform for publishing and distributing your content. We need all these rights in order to be able to provide the service you signed up for.

But notice, Twitter’s TOS doesn’t say they can ONLY use your content for purposes of providing the services to you. They’re retaining the flexibility to do whatever they want.

Twitter might also argue that it has no interest in, say, taking your movie idea and making money from it. That’s not Twitter’s business model. It wouldn’t make any sense.

Arguably true. But from a purely legal perspective, they basically can do whatever they want with your content, and according to the Terms of Service you have agreed.