[rza]

I thought that was a fair question which crossed my mind as well. Do your tweets belong to Twitter (e.g. can they delete/modify your content once it's on their servers)? If you post a work on a public site, without explicit copyright, are you granted an implicit copyright? If I post a jsfiddle, are people allowed to use that in their code? I don't think the questions are that obvious, at least for me with zero background in copyright law.

[tommorris]

> Do your tweets belong to Twitter (e.g. can they delete/modify your content once it's on their servers)?

You are conflating physical control of something with control of copyright.

The right to delete or modify content isn't the same as copyright. If you write a Wikipedia article, you own the copyright. You license the copyright with a non-exclusive, royalty-free license (Creative Commons) and you put it in a form that practically invites deletion and modification. But that deletion and modification doesn't change your ownership of the original copyright.

On a much simpler level, if I buy a current pop music album on CD, I have the right to "delete/modify" the content. I could put the CD through a wood chipper or drop it from a very high building or any number of other things. None of these would change the copyright status of the album.

> If you post a work on a public site, without explicit copyright, are you granted an implicit copyright?

No. You grant whatever copyright the terms and conditions say you grant. If there is no explicit grant, there is no implicit grant either.

[chrismcb]

If you post a work on a public site, without explicit copyright, you are STILL granted copyright. You typically also give permission to the site (implied, or otherwise) to store and post that public work... But that permission isn't transitive. Twitter basically says "by posting to our site, you give us permission to republish it, as well as other users to republish (retweet) ON OUR SITE" BUT it is generally considered that 140 chars isn't creative enough to warrant copyright protection. If that was a case, I could easily write a post to generate all possible tweets, and then no one would be able to tweet. jsfiddle says "All code belongs to the poster and no license is enforced." Which means if you post to jsfiddle, you still own the copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but I would expect that if you posted something to a site like jsfiddle, you are actually giving implicit permission for people to use your code. This would be different than to you posting your code to your own personal blog.

[Steuard]

I'm not a lawyer or any sort of expert on copyright law, and in particular, I know that I can't comment on things like whether there's a minimum level of creative effort necessary to merit copyright.

That said, my understanding is that when you write something that's eligible for copyright protection, it is automatic: you don't need to say "Copyright" explicitly at all. It doesn't matter how you use the work in question (although the protections for "unpublished" work are stronger than for "published" work).

Now, it sounds like one element of this trial involved the license implicitly granted to Twitter by posting there. But the very fact that licensing was an issue demonstrates that copyright was in force here. (And the trial evidently concluded that Twitter's license is not tantamount to placing content into the public domain.)

[dublinben]

Many tweets would not rise to the level of creativity required to earn copyright protection.

[summerdown2]

How do you suggest we measure creativity to know this?