Megan West(erby)

Not yours

mrgan:

Here we go again.

A few months ago, a web business called ChoiceTweets sold shirts with funny tweets on them. They even scraped some popular-tweet websites to offer a guaranteed selection of clever bon mots. This was widely criticized, and rightly so - who gave them the right to scrape Merlin’s Twitter feed and sell merch buoyed by his wit? Offering an opt-out program was mocked still further - as Cameron Hunt put it, running a legal business is not a 2.0 feature.

Today, Airbag Industries, a respected and loved web company, pulled the same exact boner. They launched TwitShirt, premised as above. Cameron’s criticism is even better this time:

Dear Airbag: how about I sell your website designs for $50 bucks a pop. You get $1 for each, or to opt-out, just give me your FTP passwords.

Some defended ChoiceTweets with one or more of the following:

“You should be honored they picked your tweet!”
“Jeez, what’s the big deal? It’s just a stupid thing you wrote in 10 seconds.”
“You’ll get exposure this way!”

Let’s be clear: Airbag Industries, LLC doesn’t get to decide whether fame, honor, or attribution are sufficient compensation for your writing. For someone to sell a shirt the entire premise of which is yours does not constitute some sort of “fair use”. No one will be buying these because they’re well made American Apparel shirts, nor because of the curvy arrow thing under your tweet. Your idea sells the shirt, 100%. The fact that TwitShirt has an opt-in royalty system (50c per shirt) changes nothing. They assume that the tweet is theirs to use until you complain, at which point you can’t negotiate anything without giving them your Twitter password. This is not a business relationship. This is douchebag behavior, end of story.

If your tweet is good enough that someone would pay $20 for it, it’s valuable enough that no one should just steal it.

Emphasis mine. I’ve been thinking quite a bit, lately, about what opportunities I’ve been offered for “exposure.” Intellectual property and web 2.0: the postmodern frontier of exploitation.

17 April 2009 ·