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back to article Twitter will delete jokes after a DMCA takedown – but NOT my photos, fumes angry snapper

A photographer is suing Twitter, claiming it refused to remove unauthorized copies of her copyrighted snaps from its social network. Kristen Pierson has filed a copyright-infringement complaint [PDF] against Twitter in the Los Angeles District Court, alleging the website has ignored her request to take down images she snapped …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    repeat after me

    hey.

    if I hear a funny joke and can recall it properly, recount it properly and keep the delivery okay then I'll repeat it. I'm certainly not going to go out to find the original author of the joke....or indeed pay them any royalties.

    of course, *I* am not paid to make jokes or deliver a show - but if you dont want people to repeat your jokes, then dont say them in public, on twitter ...or at all. Jokes are like the Chinese take on copyright infringements - where its a form of honour to be copied - sure, it might be great to be the one who invented a one liner or great joke....prove that you did,

    and on the serious/darker note - shall we also find the one person who came up with the Clapham 'joke', the various NASA 'jokes' etc etc - you see where this goes....

    8 2 Reply
    1. DavCrav
      Reply Icon

      Re: repeat after me

      "if I hear a funny joke and can recall it properly, recount it properly and keep the delivery okay then I'll repeat it. I'm certainly not going to go out to find the original author of the joke....or indeed pay them any royalties."

      And that's fine. But probably you shouldn't go on television and repeat them while pretending they are yours. And the same holds for Twitter. You would accept that it's wrong if someone blogged about a novel, every day writing a page of the novel as a single post, until they had copied out the whole thing. What about a short poem, which could fit into a dozen tweets or a single blog post? At what point does something lose its copyright provisions, and should that be based on length?

      5 2 Reply
      1. Peter 26
        Reply Icon

        Re: repeat after me

        It's not like Conan goes on Twitter himself and steals the jokes. It will be one of his writers who are paid to come up with jokes for him that stole it.

        1 2 Reply
        1. BoldMan
          Reply Icon

          Re: repeat after me

          And? Why is that any sort of excuse for stealing other people's work?

          0 1 Reply
        2. Robert Carnegie Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: repeat after me

          In one episode of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_60_on_the_Sunset_Strip

          - Aaron Sorkin's series set inside basically "Saturday Night Live" - a writer under pressure used a stolen joke and got hell for it. It turned out to have been stolen and stolen and stolen, ultimately from the "Studio 60" show. This is fiction.

          Bob Monkhouse was perhaps unfairly called "The Thief of Bad Gags" - because that was Milton Berle - Bob collected them but may have not used them. And I've got an autobiographical book by Jasper Carrott where he remembers as a folk club MC going to watch circuit comedians and steal their lines. Including an especially fruitful occasion watching Bob Monkhouse.

          But admitting it in print doesn't make it right.

          Anything uttered in public can still be copyright, I think - but that doesn't mean that you will be able to stop infringement.

          0 0 Reply
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: repeat after me

            Repeating stories and jokes has been going on for millennia, it's embedded in most cultures.

            The photo thing, fair enough, but jokes............

            0 0 Reply
  2. veti Silver badge

    Who first posted it on Twitter?

    This is Not Even Remotely The Same as the "retweeted joke DMCA takedown" the other day.

    Seems to me there's a difference between "posting something you own on Twitter and having it retweeted", and "posting something that someone else owns and you don't have the authority to publish on Twitter, whether it's retweeted or not".

    If you post something on Twitter, I'd say - as a purely lay commenter - that you shouldn't really have a leg to stand on when others retweet it. If it's not explicitly set out in Twitter's terms of use that that can happen, then it should be; and in the meantime, that's within the parameters of what you should expect. It's like posting something to USENET and then complaining that it's quoted in replies.

    But if someone else steals your photo and tweets that, without your authority, then that's exactly what copyright law is supposed to protect against.

    So for me, the question is who was the first person to put it on Twitter? If that person had authority to do that, then the photographer boned and server her right for being so careless. But if that person was acting unlawfully, then she's 100% in the right and Twitter should be taking down all instances of the photo.

    8 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Who first posted it on Twitter?

      She's not a US corporation. Her little DMCA joke doesn't mean anything. The DMCA was written and passed by corporations to serve their interests not hers. Who the hell does she think she is? What a fuckwit.

      6 11 Reply
      1. Michael Habel
        Reply Icon

        Re: Who first posted it on Twitter?

        She's not a US corporation. Her little DMCA joke doesn't mean anything. The DMCA was written and passed by corporations to serve their interests not hers. Who the hell does she think she is? What a fuckwit.

        Charming I'm sure... Of course you are 100% absolutely correct here, but you've could've been less of a dick about it....

        10 2 Reply
    2. JonP
      Reply Icon

      Re: Who first posted it on Twitter?

      From the linked document -

      IV. FACTS

      A. Pierson created copyrightable photographs and registered them with the

      U.S. Copyright Office.

      ...

      B. A Twitter user or users copied and displayed the Infringing Image

      without license or permission from Pierson.

      Obviously this is from the complaint and hasn't been proved (or whatever the correct term is) - but not looking good for Twitter.

      0 0 Reply
    3. Super Fast Jellyfish
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Re: Who first posted it on Twitter?

      They weren't being retweeted but C&P'd into new tweets...

      0 0 Reply
  3. Notas Badoff
    Joke

    Why can't they ...

    just share the jokes?

    1 0 Reply
  4. cortland

    It's been said

    It's been said that EVERY joke made since may be found in the long out of copyright _Joe Miller's Joke Book_.

    http://www.elfinspell.com/Humor/JoeMiller/JestBook1.html

    0 0 Reply
    1. DavCrav
      Reply Icon

      Re: It's been said

      "It's been said that EVERY joke made since may be found in the long out of copyright _Joe Miller's Joke Book_."

      Sure, but it's also been said that the Sun revolves around the Earth, disease is transmitted by smell, and the government can install filters that can't trivially be bypassed. Do you think it's true, though? I guess there's the standard "three things, the last one of which is meant to be funny" in that book, so you might be right in this case.

      0 0 Reply
  5. Jonathan Richards 1

    Never mind all that copyright stuff...

    ... what in the blue blazes is a "juice cleanse", and why would seeing someone spill one be remotely funny? Doesn't a joke have to be actually amusing?

    0 0 Reply
  6. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    Reminds me of Youtube (Google) who is balancing on that line where they make SHEDLOADS of money by being a bit slow to react to copyright issues. The tactic being that once you are big enough, YOU make the rules, and only get richer, and richer.

    0 0 Reply

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