Regarding Twitter’s TOS

A few people have mentioned this section of Twitter’s Terms of Service, claiming it justifies the existence of Tweet Nothings:

You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

But this argument has a few flaws. First, I don’t think the above clause is intended to allow a “partner” to publish a commercial book of tweets. The reason it’s there is that Twitter is a service with lots of ways to get data in and out of it. Online republishing and reuse of the data is something Twitter explicitly enables, and that’s why it has a vast API (application programming interface). Fun things like Favstar and Twitterbelle would not be able to exist otherwise. But I honestly don’t think this clause means hey, we got content! Call us and we’ll do a book deal.

Second, Twitter is explicit in other places that it’s not OK to appropriate content without permission. For example, the draft API rules say this:

Get permission from the user that created the Tweet if you want to make their Tweet into a commercial good or product, like using a Tweet on a t-shirt or a poster or making a book based on someone’s Tweets.

(Thanks to commenter Jessica for pointing this out.)

And finally, even assuming Twitter is in the habit of partnering with novelty book publishers under these terms, I seriously doubt that they would allow a book resulting from such a partnership to be devoid of Twitter’s logo, branding, full company name and even URL. I’d expect to see fine print like “This book produced in partnership with Twitter, Inc. http://twitter.com/”. But all of these things are absent from Tweet Nothings.

When Nick Douglas compiled Twitter Wit, he obtained permission from each contributor individually. If he couldn’t find the person, or they said no thanks, the tweet didn’t go in the book. And he even got one of Twitter’s founders to write a foreword. That was the right way to make a Twitter book.

This, however, is the wrong way. I’d love to be proven incorrect, but so far there is no evidence that Suzanne Schwalb and Peter Pauper Press so much as told anyone involved what they were planning to do. Not my friends who wrote their book for them, not Twitter. And that stinks.