Reader Question: Is a Twitter ‘pitch’ protected by copyright laws?
A tweet from @AntoBlueberry:
Do you think that writing a pitch on twitter can be considered copyright? Maybe you already discussed the thing…
No, and to prove my point, I just stole your idea, AntoBluebbery, worked up a pitch based on it, and sold it for a million dollars!
Just kidding.
I did source this article. A few excerpts:
An interesting post by Jeffrey Zeldman claims tweets are not subject to copyright because copyright protection does not extend to “names, titles, or short phrases” according to copyright.gov. But is he right?
It probably depends on the tweet.
Grammatically speaking, a phrase is a series of words that do not make a complete sentence, such as a prepositional phrase. And while tweets are limited to 140 characters, you can easily fit a few (short) sentences in a single tweet.
An inventive poet could also fit an entire poem inside of a tweet. Certainly, there are many jokes that can fit within the limit. And Hemingway once wrote an entire short story within the maximum length of a tweet: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
A few comments on Zeldman’s post also bring up interesting points. ‘Eric TF Bat’ brought up Ashleigh Brilliant whose 17-word epigram was ruled to be protected by copyright in an infringement case.
There was the case of a recent pitch that sold: “Rome, Sweet Rome”:
Warner Bros. has preemptively purchased the high-concept pitch “Rome, Sweet Rome” from first-time scribe James Erwin, an author and two-time “Jeopardy!” champion from Des Moines, Iowa.
Erwin’s pitch sale came about as a result of several postings on the website Reddit.com, an online community and social news aggregator where users vote to determine which posts land on the site’s home page.
One problem: Did Erwin own the concept? And if not, how can Warner Bros. claim ownership? In fact, does anybody own the idea? For more on that, here is an article from a site called The Law of Tomorrow, Today.
Actually I’m not sure there is a definitive answer to the question because I don’t believe a court has ever ruled on the subject.
Perhaps the more pertinent question is why would a writer ever pitch an idea via Twitter? With the threat of IP theft looming out there, wouldn’t we be much better off reserving our pitches for more contained, private forums?
Any legal eagles out there, if you have any insight into this subject, please feel free to share your thoughts in Comments.
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