Twitshirt – Do You Own Your Tweets?

On the surface, it seems like a cute idea: A Tiwtter T-Shirt. 140 characters of your favourite  tweeter’s lyrical stylings on a freshly-pressed American Apparel t-shirt. Only USD$20 and you can parade to your next Social-Media Club Coffeehouse Meetup in something truly limited, leet and poly-cotton.

That’s the premise behind Twitshirt, from the clever-sounding kids at Airbag Industries.

Twitshirt - Are You Cool With Someone Selling Your Tweets?

Who Owns Your Tweets?

Under the surface, it raises a big question: Can your tweets be sold? Printed on a shirt? Worn by others?

Everyone loves having their updates Re-Tweeted, but what if the Re-Tweeter, or in this case Tweeter-Printer, was making cash off them?

Twitshirt operate on a royalty system – “Giving back to the Twitter community” – by sending 50c your way for every $20 shirt your tweets appear on. But is this enough?

YOU Own Your Tweets.

Mark Cuban has pondered the same thing: Are Tweets Copyrighted? and a few reasonably-legalese-speaking commenters have suggested that YES, you own Intellectual Property rights over material you publish on Twitter. They even point to Twitter’s FAQs:

“Twitter Copyright Policy

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.”

Can they be sold?

Whether you’re happy with Twitshirt’s 50c per shirt royalty tip, or not, it raises a question about the ownership of property in the public domain. Regardless of character length.

UPDATE: Since I started writing this, Twitshirt have added an opt-out.