Can You Copyright a Tweet?

Can you copyright a tweet? It’s a great question, loaded with legal and practical implications, especially for folks who use social media for business. Molly Osadjan of Denver’s MGA Communications raised the question in a post in that company’s blog after she attended a recent panel presentation I organized for the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.

The panel addressed legal issues in social media, and since employment law and copyright tend to be two of the biggest legal issues in this area, I asked attorneys Jennifer England from Mountain States Employers Council and Ryan Phillips of Kirkpatrick Townsend & Stockton to lend technical legal perspective to my practical law for human-owned business views.

“Most likely not” is the legal answer to Molly’s question. (Remember, however, that I don’t give legal advice in this blog—if you want legal advice on this question, you should hire me, Ryan or another lawyer.) The aptly-named site Can You Copyright a Tweet?, by attorney Brock Shinen lays out several different legal reasons why it would be difficult, if not impossible, to copyright a tweet. The factual nature of most tweets is one reason. Their brevity is another—copyrights don’t work well for short statements or titles, which is why I can use the same title as Mr. Shinen.

“Why would you want to?” is my practical answer to Molly’s question. Sharing information, some of it even useful, is the point of Twitter and the other social media networks. Certainly, some information—photographs, videos, music, and blog posts—is protected by copyright. You have protectable rights in those creations, and you should always observe the rights of others in what they’ve created.

Business relationships in social media, however, develop when you share useful information. You might have created the information or it might be from someone you trust. That is why I chose not to use strict copyright protections for this blog. I hope readers feel free to share what I’ve written. The Creative Commons license on this blog allows use of my writing without concerns about “fair use” and such, so long as what I’ve written is not changed and it is attributed to me.

When others share your thoughts with their connections, whether in social media or in real life, they build your credibility. Having your tweets re-tweeted (I never would have imagined, even just two years ago, I would be using words like that in legal writing) is a hallmark of your influence. Mine is slightly below the most influential tweeter, Justin Bieber, but among the business and community-oriented folks who follow me, my thoughts apparently have some value.

Case in point: I’ve been working on a diagnostic tool for business owners to better understand what makes their company more or less valuable. The importance of the owner to the day-to-day functions of the business is a big indicator, so I fired off a tweet “The business owner who brags about not taking vacations almost never has a business worth bragging about.”

That tweet was picked up and re-tweeted by some people in my network and by some other people I’ve never heard of. I had Twitter conversations with folks who wrote directly to me in response to that tweet. That’s what I hope for when I use Twitter. If your business is using Twitter, chances are that’s what you want, too.

If, however, you’ve developed a slogan to describe an aspect of your business, it is best to talk to a lawyer about how you use the phrase and possible trademark protections before you start tweeting it.