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.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday Legal Holiday and the Content of America’s Character

More than our other legal holidays, this one challenges us. It was a challenge to establish the holiday.  Holiday in place, this day now reminds us of a more fundamental challenge: Are we who we say we are? The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is a national mirror. In its reflection we see a vision of ourselves that dares us to recognize our failings and still strive to live up to our ideals; a vision brought into sharper relief this year by the proximity of the tragedy in Tucson and our responses to it.

The third Monday in January is the federal holiday honoring the life and achievements of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The tumultuous story of its establishment begins only four days after Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 and continues for 15 years at the federal level, even longer in some states, to culminate on November 2, 1983 with the adoption of a new legal holiday to be observed beginning in 1986. In that approval process, we see America in its full humanity, struggling with its failings, but ultimately transcendent.

Fortunately for a post on “legal” holidays, Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech begins with very legalistic metaphors: the ideals of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence are a promissory note issued to the people of our country, yet payments on that note to people of color are being returned for insufficient funds. Dr. King, however, refuses to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt, and without asking for or accepting excuses, demands an appropriate cure; he calls on our nation to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

We have made progress toward Dr. King’s dream; the first non-white male President of the United States is one clear indication. I see another indicator in my family. As a high school freshman, I was bused under court order to integrate a traditionally black inner-city school in Virginia to overcome decades of Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate-but-equal failings. Today, my daughter attends an inner-city, racially-diverse high school in Denver by choice. Yet, lingering achievement gaps among racial and economic groups in Colorado’s schools are but one set of reminders of the work we have yet to do.

Striving is central to the content of the American character. I am reminded of the remarks of one of Dr. King’s predecessors in the civil rights movement concerning an even earlier figure in America’s struggles to live out its creed. From W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, writing about President Abraham Lincoln: “I love him not because he was perfect, but because he was not and yet triumphed.”

Is Business a Loser in the Law School Game?

Building better lawyers for business was a concern of mine long before I started blogging; naturally, the topic appears here from time-to-time. A newspaper article is usually the trigger. I couldn’t let Is Law School a Losing Game?, David Segal’s piece in this last Sunday New York Times on alleged abuses in law school ratings and marketing, go without observation on why this question matters to business.

Before I do that, however, for any prospective law student reader, I want to reprise some advice from Willy Wonka and the Law Degree Factory, one of my better titles. if I may say so. Today’s law degrees will be golden tickets, economically, for relatively few of the 40,000+ graduates each year. Law can be a good career for many more, if you are thoughtful in your law school decisions and careful about financing it, certainly more careful than Michael Wallerstein and his quarter-million dollars of student loans highlighted in the Times story.

Business has a stake in the law school game because high legal fees, a concern for many businesses, are connected to the game, beginning when law schools use the allure of huge starting salaries to attract students.  From the Times article:

In the Wonderland of these statistics [supplied by law schools for ratings purposes], a remarkable number of law school graduates are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

The nation’s largest law firms compete for the top graduates of the top law schools using salaries that make little to no sense in the rest of the legal economy. Wall Street lawyer salaries, however, do ultimately influence Main Street lawyer salaries. Ripples of competition for talent spread even to relatively small legal markets like Denver. Even if we assume, in a law school-style hypothetical, a talented young lawyer values job satisfaction (like working with human-owned businesses, which have modest budgets for legal fees) over the greater economic rewards of slaving away for large multinational corporations, that lawyer’s debt load can limit his or her choices. From the Times article:

“I think the student loans that kids leave law school with are more scandalous than payday loans,” says Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Alabama. “And because it’s so easy to get a student loan, law school tuition has grossly outpaced the rate of inflation for the last 20 years. It’s now astonishingly high.”

Law firms are businesses, even though we don’t always act that way. We have to price what we sell (hours, for most of us) to cover costs and return a profit to the owners. The biggest cost, of course, is attorney salaries.

Some suggest a reduction in the number of law schools and, thus, lawyers is necessary. I’m not so sure we need to force that outcome, especially considering the number of legally underserved populations. We do need, however, much greater transparency (accuracy, if you’re a cynic) in the law schools about the employment prospects for each school’s graduates. Market forces should then help bring the cost of a legal education into line with the realistic economic benefits of a legal education.

Sour grapes have no part in this post, in case anyone is thinking that. I graduated with honors from The University of Texas School of Law. UT Law is perennially a top law school in the all-important U.S. News & World Report rankings, though I suspect its administration would love to see it move up from the tied-for-15th spot it has held for some time. I couldn’t have done it without government loans.

$5,000 a year covered my expenses, and I repaid those loans, on time and in full, ten years later with a salary that started at about twice my debt load. Of course, I graduated in 1983 and UT Law was a bargain. I’m a lawyer, not an economist, but a 2:1 or even 1:1 ratio of likely salary to debt allows more flexibility than the 1:2 to 1:3 ratios that many current grads appear to be facing.