Who owns your tweets? The answer might actually be your boss

Steyn and Aziz, two of the Cows in Cape Town, posed an interesting question this afternoon. Who owns your tweets? Clearly re-tweeting is a big part of Twitter culture, but do you have any sort of intellectual property claim over what’s your content?

There are several answers to this question.  One of them from analyst Jeremiah Owyang, is that quite possibly your boss might be the owner and not you…in addition to owning any Facebook photos, You Tube videos etc developed and posted ...

at work. The reason? “Employees sign employment contracts that may indicate that all intellectual property created during employment may be owned by the company.”

It’s obviously not that straight forward. A Twitter feed that has a lot of followers and appears on a lot of lists is clearly useful to a company, but would it have value if the person left, and would you really want to enforce it? However, solicitor Lisa J Borodkin, who comments on Jeremiah’s blog says that:

“It’s important in the age of the blog and Twitter that people understand that a clause claiming all ‘intellectual property’ created during the term of employment would be property of the company, would cover tweets and blog posts. This provision would also cover anything else creative the person did on the side, such as writing a screenplay, or creating a comic strip, even purely for fun.”

As a result, the solution here would be two fold. First of all, to have employment contracts read that only work related content belongs to the boss. And secondly to develop clear social media guidelines for staff (we’re doing so currently at Cow, as much to protect the people we work with as ourselves).

Finally, looking at the question of ‘who owns your tweets?’ on a wider scale, the answer is you do. But there is an important caveat as this Mr Tweet blog post states. Twitter says you own what you post, yet it can also refuse service and close accounts.

And when it comes to source attribution and re-using content for gain, there would be a grey area where, say Twitter is used to break a news story. “That tweet becomes the source, who does it belong to?” The Mr Tweet post says we’ll never know definitively until there’s a court case about it, which I imagine shouldn’t be too far off.

Image - Kumar Appaiah

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