Finally, twitter very clearly states in their terms: “The Twitter service makes it possible to post images and text hosted on Twitter to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display data hosted on Twitter.com must provide a link back to Twitter.”

And here is the crux… Twitter users accepted the above term (and others) during the registration process. As such all users are aware of this (as users are required to review and accept the terms during registration).

http://cloudappers.com/2009/01/commentweet-beta-twitter-conversation-on-blogs/

However, since many blogs using the plugin are also displaying ads, is there a ‘for profit’ condition that lessens the validity of the fair use argument in favor of using the tweets? This was what ended up torpedoing the Choicetweets t-shirt project — whether or not an individual tweet is copyrightable, selling content for profit without making an effort to clear it with the author (even in cases of clear infringement/copyright, such as a tweeted haiku) is on the wrong side of the issue.

Search engines are bad with scrapers. There’s lots of sites that scrape mailing lists and they end up with pagerank of 7 or 8 and they outrank the real archives and the real archives, google won’t even index.

Joost: Thank you for the info, post is updated!

“the easiest way would be to just delete the tweet themselves from their own stream.”

That’s actually not true. Deleting a tweet from your stream does NOT delete it from twitter search. Though I would agree that that behavior is odd, it is the current fact. Blog owners can delete tweetbacks with my plugin, and if they do, they’ll stay deleted.

As for the speed comments: Dan has his work cut out for him in that area, I’ve got mine in other areas, f/i there’s some issues with shorturl providers giving back wrong data, which results in tweetbacks that look like spam :)

I’m probably going to install either of the Database one (Zarrella released one this morning as I was writing it, hellacious timing) so I’m going to see about that later this week :)

The difference between pingbacks/trackbacks and tweetbacks is that pingbacks send out their notification to the original site. Users, when blogging, select whether they want to send pingbacks out. With tweetbacks, the process is passive. The blog goes out looking for the tweetbacks without the Twitter user doing anything.

This is very true and a good point. But between use of tweets on the “public” timeline and API tools, I think a Twitter would have a very hard time convincing any legal body that he had the ability or right to control where his 140-character tweets appear.

I’m not going to worry about it — at least not yet. We’ll see how this pans out.

Agreed on performance for that JavaScript solution. One of these days, I’m going to decipher my Comments template file and get Tweetbacks to appear properly with the plugin.

Certainly a lawyer defending the use would argue exactly as you did, but a counter argument would be that there was no way to foresee it as such a technology had never existed. In this case, the newness of the product could hurt it.

An analogy, to play devil’s advocate, would be with RSS scraping. It is foreseeable that it would be used in RSS readers, but not on other sites. An RSS is, in a way, an API. And without a clear license many argue that it should be foreseeable that scraping would take place and that an implied license grants them that right.

An argument that Twitter users granted such an implied license for tweetbacks could work, but it could also be a dangerous way to win with consequences elsewhere on the Web.

Maria: Believe me, I know well how much you hate scraping. But, like you, I did install the Tweetbacks JavaScript (though I pulled it due to speed issues, not copyright ones, may try one of the newer ones later though).

The difference between pingbacks/trackbacks and tweetbacks is that pingbacks send out their notification to the original site. Users, when blogging, select whether they want to send pingbacks out. With tweetbacks, the process is passive. The blog goes out looking for the tweetbacks without the Twitter user doing anything.

In short, pingbacks go from the commenter to the original post, with tweetbacks the original post finds the commenter. Does not change the end result, but could have an impact when looking at it from the law.

Overall though, I don’t think there are any serious issues with tweetbacks, something I tried to get across. The problem is that it only takes one perfect storm and we have to play hypotheticals to prepare for that…

To me, a Tweetback is a sign of a post’s popularity. If people are tweeting its link, they like it. The more tweetbacks, the better.

It’s also a good way to encourage Twitter users to spread the word about blog posts they like. When their icon and Twitter name appears in a Tweetback, blog post readers learn about them. This could help them get new followers.

In defense of the plugin (not the Javascript solution), there IS a way to filter out certain Twitter IDs. I think that can be used to remove tweetbacks by people who don’t want their tweets “scraped” for this purpose. Once filtered, a “clean up” feature removes the tweets from the database. So it really is a better solution for those worried about copyright infringement — provided that an offended tweet author takes the time to ask to have his tweets removed.

I use the JavaScript solution now, primarily because I like the way it looks and I’m having a heck of a time integrating the plugin in my theme.

Anyway, I hope this does not become a serious issue. Frankly, I see no difference between it and pingbacks/trackbacks — and don’t understand why anyone else would.

I did not ask specific permission to use those tweets – would this be considered a copyright issue under the Twitter Terms of Use or are the comments we post on Twitter considered to be in the public domain?

Thanks for the chance to comment on this.

(It also seems pretty straightforward that fair use would be a successful defense, but I’d hope that it never gets so far in courts as to need a defense.)

And of course, I’m not a lawyer, and you’re not a lawyer…not that most lawyers do an adequate job of understanding trends in online intellectual property before they write about them ;)