I told a dumb joke that started an intellectual property debate
A few weeks ago, on my lunch break, I noticed someone spill their high end juice cleanse all over the sidewalk. Something about the incident made me feel like a deity was on my side. Now, thanks to The Verge, Mashable, The Daily Dot, Gizmodo, Engadget, The Guardian, BBC, Time, Wired, Fast Company, Dazed and approximately eight trillion other random sites in a multitude of languages, other people found out that I revel hard in schadenfreude.
I’m a writer and I’ve written jokes and serious things for various sites. It is my chosen profession and I make a living doing it. I’ve always wanted to be a writer and one of my most vivid (and nerdiest) childhood memories is the time my 6th grade English teacher pointed out to us that there are infinite ways to string together letters and words, so much so that the odds of coming up with the exact same sentence that someone else wrote are pretty slim. In college, we ran our essays through plagiarism detection software that scanned our sentences for matching ones in known publications. I always wondered, “what if I accidentally plagiarize someone and get in trouble?” but it never happened.
Mark Cohen calculated how many tweets we could write before we ran out of ideas. Turns out, it’s equal to about “1 followed [by] 108 zeroes.” That’s a lot, even after you weed out the gibberish. That’s probably a higher number than the average rent in Los Angeles but it’s hard to be sure since I’m not great at math.
If you’re a writer of any kind (good at math or bad at math), Twitter is an important platform for you. I’ve been telling dumb jokes on Twitter long enough to build up a decent following, like many of the writers and comedians I follow. I’ve met other writers on Twitter and as a result of those connections landed writing gigs and met fellow collaborators in the non-digital world. Twitter is THE digital networking tool for writers, especially in comedy, because the 140 character format is uniquely suited for jokes and short bits. If telling jokes on Twitter weren’t a big deal, advertisers wouldn’t be paying popular accounts to tweet about their brands.
So why copy and paste a tweet that someone else wrote? What’s the pay-off? Is it because you see someone else’s joke doing well, getting hundreds of retweets, and you want to capitalize on it? There is financial incentive in getting sponsors, which comes from having your material loved and shared; people copy and pasting jokes word for word are attempting to capitalize on that incentive.
I don’t care if someone makes a similar observation as me. A writer’s skill comes in how they articulate an observation rather than the content of the observation itself. The specific way they articulate that observation is their intellectual property, regardless of whether or not you think it’s funny. I’m not trying to sue you or ruin your life because you recycled a knock knock joke you heard once as a child. I’m telling you, firmly, that you have no right to monetize my ideas. When you copy and paste someone else’s writing and do not credit them, you are plagiarizing their work.
(Twitter theft is a rampant problem, and if you want to know more about why it’s so bad, please direct your attention to this eloquent article by the talented Rob Fee in which he discusses the amount of money people can make by plagiarizing others’ tweets. The short answer is: IT’S A LOT.)
But as with all issues of digital authorship, there is a lot of grey area involved here. Precedent varies. As Luke O’Neil pointed out in his Dazed article, the European Union “declared that the reproduction of 11 words was enough to show infringement” but the general consensus in the United States seems to be that it simply varies by tweet.
If you found my writing funny enough to steal, why should you be able to claim credit for it? How hard is it to just press the RT button, rather than putting forth the effort to actually copy, paste, and re-post the joke?
It’s a nuanced issue, and I don’t think it’s fair to say that any side of it is 100% correct (but, again, terrible at math). I also don’t think there’s a blanket way to enforce this kind of stuff, which is why Twitter responds to complaints on an individual basis. I don’t work for Twitter. It’s not up to me to decide how they enforce intellectual property rules. However, if you re-post other users’ tweets and claim them as your own, you are violating Twitter’s TOS which you agreed to when you joined the site.
A lot of people think I’m angry that my tweet is now getting re-posted all over the internet, but it’s more awe-inspiring than anything. The parody versions are hilarious and remind me why I love Twitter. Watching my tweet get re-posted thousands of times feels like weird-kind of awesome- terrifying-experimental-surrealist performance art. People are actually talking about this issue and intelligently debating the evolving nature of authorship in the digital realm, and I’m glad, because it’s a conversation worth having.
The one thing I am pretty angry about is that all of the targeted advertising on my social media is now solely for high end juice cleanses.
So, while I await my multi-million dollar high end juice cleanse brand sponsorship deal, I think I’ll hijack the internet attention I’ve gained because of this debacle and use it to continue trying to get Donald Trump to block me on Twitter. Please, @realDonaldTrump, I’m an immigrant and I’ve got so many #scorching #hot #takes.
