Which was in the midst of a conversation about the hundreds of millions of dollars that donald trump was ordered to pay.
I just have a question…
Wasn’t the text attributed (albeit in a roundabout way) to Donald’s truth social account? From the context, that’s obvious.
So are you saying that you have to include a link to the source, or are you saying you have to expressly state the name of the person you are quoting? Or did you mean something else by “attribute” (does the source have to be evident form the post itself, independent of context)?
As for fair use…
I don’t believe his twuths are copyrighted, and even if they were, this is newsworthy information that is being commented on. I don’t think there is any legal concern about quoting donald (digestive, perhaps, but not legal).
On the attribution, yes say where the quote is coming from or link to it. That is all that is being requested. Small thing to ask. Roundabout is not good enough, especially for someone not following the thread but jumping in later, let us say to moderate it or because of a link to the post from elsewhere.
I don’t believe Tweets are copyright protected. But I am crap on legal issues and know it. The fair use part is my fault. I was thinking tweats as so short that fair use would allow quoting pretty much the entire tweat anyway. I am probably utterly confused which is why I’m leaving that up to other Mods. Thus far it sounds like what was quoted is fine, we’re waiting for one more input on the subject. @engineer_comp_geek is generally the final say on these issues.
Sorry, I’ll make sure to indicate where the quotes come from in the future. I would link, but I don’t have a Truth account and don’t think it is possible without.
As mods, we are tasked with protecting this site and nothing raises concerns faster than a potential violation of Fair Use Doctrine.
None of us are experts on this or lawyers, so we tend to err on the side of caution.
I don’t see how Tweets or Twuths are subject to copyright protection, either, but we will always take a beat to make absolutely certain. Thanks for your patience with us.
(To be clear, I wasn’t complaining about the note, just curious. I’d have asked in the thread itself, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was arguing moderation).
Even that article warns against commercial exploitation (“don’t go putting it on a t-shirt”), which is the real concern for copyright law.
I mean, is your email to your co-worker copyrighted? Not really, even if it is your original work, in part because nobody is looking to make a buck off of it.
I’m pretty sure that quoting a person running for president, as part of a discussion about his legal liability, does not run afoul of copyright laws.
I’m no lawyer, let alone a copyright lawyer, but my understanding of the general principle according to current US and international copyright law is that anything original is copyright by default, regardless of the medium it’s fixed in.
And if I recall, the SDMB’s traditional cautious approach to copying was to protect TPTB from even the faintest risk of legal action from disgruntled copyright holders.
But on the gripping hand, even if those statements were comprehensively copyrighted, it’s really likely that the standard fair use defense of quoting for the purposes of commentary and criticism would apply.
Tweets might be copyrighted. It depends on the tweet.
In order to fall under copyright protection, the tweet must be the author’s own original ideas. The tweet must also contain a certain minimal amount of creativity. If you tweet a known fact, that doesn’t meet the requirement for creativity. Facts cannot be copyrighted.
The tweet must have a certain amount of substance. If the tweet is just a single word or a short phrase, that doesn’t contain enough substance to fall under copyright protection.
Twitter/X/Whatever its name is today has the same basic copyright policy as we do here. If you tweet something (and assuming that it meets the conditions to be protected by copyright), you retain the rights to your own tweets, but X also has permanent rights to copy whatever you tweeted.
Now we get into the trickier matter of fair use. The reason this is tricky is that fair use has no formal definition. Fair use is whatever the courts decide is fair use, so you can’t know ahead of time if something is or is not fair use.
That said, there are quite a few generally accepted guidelines that most folks use.
To fall under fair use, you generally have to quote a small snippet of the work and not the entire thing. The thing about tweets is that by their nature, they are all small snippets. Technically you could create a really long tweet by chaining tweets together like posts in a thread. Copying one or two tweets out of a long thread like that would probably qualify as fair use. Copying the entire thread would definitely not qualify. Since we’re only dealing with single tweets here, they probably fall under fair use just because of their limited length.
Another factor to consider is whether or not the copy affects the value of the original. In this case, copying the tweets for discussion does not devalue Twitter/X/Whatever’s content. So no issue there.
Another factor is whether the use is for commercial purposes. If you are posting something on the SDMB for discussion, that is definitely not a commercial purpose, so we’re safe there.
Keep in mind that I am an engineer and not a copyright (or any other kind of) lawyer, but my understanding is that tweets copied for discussions like ours fall under fair use.
While you’re correct that copyright inheres in a qualified work from the moment it is created, you seem to be further asserting that using “copyright” as a verb (“to copyright”) or using the past participial form (“this work is copyrighted”) means that it has been registered (in the U. S.) with the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office.
While there is a certain logic to this position, AFAIK there is no official, semi-official, or even common connection between the two, whereas the use of the term simply to mean copyright-able, as your first three exemplars do, is extraordinarily common, if not exactly universal. (If you have an authoritative cite to support this implied claim, I’d be happy to see it.)
Perhaps you simply dislike the verbing of the word, and (as a retired copy editor) I agree that it is inelegant. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that “copyrighted” is too useful a usage, and the alternative circumlocutions are too cumbersome, to be overcome by an appeal to “grammatical correctness.”
To add some additional facts to the general topic of the thread, it is only by formally registering a work with the Copyright Office (i.e., submitting a form and paying a fee within a certain period after the initial publication) that you can obtain statutory damages (up to $30,000 per infringement) against an infringer. Without registration, all you can sue for is actual damages, which in the vast majority of cases is bupkis.
The practical upshot is that, unless the work has been registered, you won’t possibly recover enough to make it worth filing a suit.