Twitter, through its media blog, recently announced that it is making it easy to embed tweets into your site, the way many already add YouTube clips or audio from various sources.

The idea is fairly simple, you visit Twitter’s experimental “Blackbird Pie” page, paste in the full URL of the tweet (it ends with /status/########) and Twitter creates a block of HTML code that you paste into your site.

But is this something that users of Twitter really need? Though tweets are often cited in long articles, including this one pointed out by Twitter on ReadWriteWeb, the process has worked fine before and alternatives already exist.

Though I can’t say for certain how popular this feature will be, I can definitely see reasons why those who wish to quote and the Twitter users they pull from should cheer this move. However, there are also a few concerns that have me a bit worried about using this service.

How it Works

As mentioned above, all you do to use the service is find the URL of the tweet you want to cite, paste it into Twitter’s Blackbird Pie page and then insert the generated HTML into your post. Here are two samples.

First, the very first tweet from my significant other’s Twitter account for her new art blog.

Here is one from my friend and Copyright 2.0 Show co-host Patrick O’Keefe’s Twitter stream:

Finally, here is one twitter user @iLoveCopyright:

As you can see looking at the three samples, each one tries to keep the formatting of the original tweet but fails. The reason is it simply uses the background and color options from the last tweet on a page. If you upload multiple embeds to one page, the system breaks but it works fine for just one. In those cases, the embeds look the same as they look on Twitter’s site.

This is, or at least could be, the most powerful element of this new feature and reason enough for most people to consider using it. However, there are many other good reasons to embrace this new method for quoting tweets.

Advantages for Bloggers

Without embedding, the only three options for citing a tweet in your profile is to:

1. Link to the Tweet: This requires a user click and is often missed when reading a long article.
2. Take a Screenshot: Grabbing an image of the tweet requires more time and can be a hindrance to visually impaired visitors.
3. Copy the Tweet: Copying the tweet destroys the formatting and wreak havoc with attribution.

None of these options are ideal and all require at least some sacrifice, either to the reader, the Twitter user or the person doing the quoting.

Embeds are a truly elegant solution to this problem. It’s a simple copy/paste HTML code fix, the formatting/attribution is preserved (complete with clickable links) and it looks good (when only pasting one tweet).

In short, if you’re a blogger or a Web site that is looking to cite some tweets, this may be the best solution you have, at least if you only have one tweet you want to cite.

Advantages for Twitter Users

If you’re a Twitter user, this is good news as well. This system preserves the formatting and attribution of your tweets, offers clickable links to your tweet and your Twitter account and includes your icon/branding. In short, readers will know the tweet belongs to you instantly and can follow up on it easily.

The biggest advantage, however, is that it may make sharing tweets more common, increasing exposure. Since the copyright risks are minimal with a single tweet and the tool is not geared to easily copy all of the tweets from one’s account, it is simply an excellent opportunity for promotion.

However, there are also concerns that I have with this tool and, though I don’t consider these to be deal-brakers, they are all things I would like to see fixed before the service is considered to be an official “feature”.

Concerns and Problems

To be completely fair, the author of the Twitter Media blog, Robin Sloan, has made it clear that this is an experiment and not a feature. As such, problems are bound to creep up. But in addition to the formatting issue I mentioned before, there are a few other issues I would like to raise.

1. In-The-Clear Text: The embeds keep the text in the clear. While SEO concerns are minimal due to the short number of characters, this does mean that the person doing the embedding could alter the words to make the tweet say just about anything. Though you can click the links and verify the the tweet, few will likely bother with that and it is also possible to change the links to make it appear that the tweet was simply deleted.




I’m really just a robot.less than a minute ago via webJonathan Bailey
plagiarismtoday

2. Mangled Backgrounds: If you use a custom Twitter background, as I do, the script seems to mangle your embeds. It would be nice if the script could pull from the center of the background and not the upper-lefthand corner, but in lieu of that it might be wise just to have all embeds use the same background or a solid color related to the profile.
3. Lengthy Code: Shorter code is already on the future feature list but the length of the code is rather large, especially when compared to YouTube or other embeds. It has a lot of in-line CSS that causes the interference with multiple embeds in the same page and can be a real pain to edit.

While these problems are pretty nasty, they can probably be fixed in future iterations, especially if Twitter decides this is a good idea and invests time and energy in making a true embedding service.

Bottom Line

All in all, this is a neat service and, in my opinion, a good idea. Quoting tweets is a common practice and, due to the nature of tweets, almost always allowed by copyright law. These embeds just make it easier to quote properly and ensures that the original author gets credit.

With a few fixes, I could easily see this experiment being integrated deep into Twitter’s product and would welcome that change.

In the meantime, if you’re only quoting one tweet on a page, give it a try. Otherwise, you’ll probably want to look at an alternate method for citing tweets in your posts, as you can see above.

1: Psystar Appeals Injunction, Destroys Copies of Mac Cloning Tool

First off today, Psystar, the Mac clone maker sued by Apple and forced to stop sales due to an injunction, has filed an appeal against that injunction and has said that it has destroyed all but one copy of its Rebel EFI program, an application that allows users to install OSX on non-Apple machines, a violation of the OSes terms. Psystar has also indicated that it will sell computers with Linux in the future instead of OSX or Windows.

2: Apple App Store Has Lost $450 Million To Piracy

Next up today, while speaking of Apple, a report on Wall Street 24/7 says that Apple has lost an estimated $140 million due to app store piracy on jailbroken phones and developers have lost more than twice as much. Some developers have also reported having over 90% piracy rates of their apps and many expensive ones are frequent top downloads on mainstream piracy sites.

3: Tweet Tweet: Can I Copyright That?

Finally today, law.com has an interesting article about tweets and copyright that states while a tweet can be copyrightable, it is impractical to enforce such rights, at least in the U.S. Furthermore, it says that tweetbacks, and other such systems, are not a form of scraping as they obey the terms of Twitter’s API, which users already agreed to.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

A new Twitter-based service, “soft boiled launched” yesterday, aims to let users put tweets under Creative Commons licenses. The service, TweetCC, aims to bridge the gap between CC licenses, intended for Web pages and downloadable files, and the 140-character world of Twitter.

The service brings with it a slick and easy-to-use interface as well as some serious questions about how copyright and CC applies to Twitter. However, for those who are adamant about licensing everything they create under one copyleft license, the service can provide a way to extend your terms to your Twitter feed.

The questions that remain are whether the service is worthwhile and, if it is, who is it for?

The Basics

TweetCC is a Twitter-based service but not one that requires your password, nor even your username. If you wish to register your tweets under as CC license, all you have to do is log into Twitter, visit the TweetCC license selection page and click the “Use License” link next to the license you want to use.

You will then be directed to Twitter, where TweetCC will paste the content of a specially-formatted tweet into your message box. You then submit the message, as usual, and it will send the reply to the @tweetcc account with the CC license you have chosen, which will be picked up and recorded by their bot in about thirty minutes.

Once the bot has recorded your tweet, you’ll be added to the growing list of users that have registered their Twitter accounts with the service, which numbers just shy of 800 as of this writing. Those that are interested in using your tweets will then be able to visit the TweetCC site and lookup your username, read your license and act accordingly.

Those interested in simply looking through the database of CC-licensed tweets can also simply go through the list, picking usernames to pull from.

Problems in Twitterland

Though the service is certainly great in terms of its simplicity and usefulness, there are several reasons for concern.

1. Copyrightability: As has been discussed many times before on this site and elsewhere, most tweets don’t rise to the threshold of copyrightability. There simply isn’t enough requisite creativity in most tweets, making the issue of CC licensing for most tweets moot.
2. CC Validity: The service doesn’t actually affix the CC license to the work itself, but rather, stores an @reply that expresses the wish to license the work accordingly. There’s also little indication as to how one would complete a CC license via Twitter, as one has to reference the original license when using the work.
3. Opt Out: Currently, once you register for the service, there is no clear way to opt out. Though you can remove a CC license from your site, you can’t remove it from TweetCC at this time. You can, however, change your license terms as TweetCC will record multiple licenses, showing clearly which one is the most recent.

I spoke with Andy Clarke and Brian Suda, the creators of TweetCC, about these issues. On the subject of copyrightability, Suda had this to say:

While I and probably most people generally agree with you, there are probably several that do not…. It could be possible to use reuse everyone’s tweets and risk a court battle to fight it out with those who disagree with your (and my) moot copyrightability thoughts – or spend a few evenings, knock-up tweetCC.com and be sure that any and everything you are using for a commercial purpose is explicitly allowed. We took the latter stance because it was easy, and the right thing to do.

Regarding the issue of fulfilling the CC license, Suda says that it is outside the scope of the project and “between the two customers not the service.”

Finally, according to them, it is possible to opt out of the service by sending a tweet to @tweetcc indicating that you do not wish your tweets to be used. According to them, some have already done exactly that.

In short, though the service isn’t likely necessary for the vast majority of tweets, for those that wish to ensure that all of their content is under the same license or that they are completely within the bounds of the law when using a tweet, TweetCC can be useful.

If the early response is any indication, it is clear that Suda and Clarke have created something that many people were very eager for.

Conclusions

I’ve gone ahead and licensed my tweets under the same terms that this site is under, to ensure consistency. Though the service likely only has limited usefulness, due to the nature of copyright, and has many challenges to its application, it is currently the only thing going in this field. As such, as the saying goes, it is better than nothing.

However, it will be nice to see how this system grows. Some initial thoughts include making a database of all the registered users by the license they choose, making it easier to find tweets by license, and also an index of the tweets by how they are licensed. The idea being to make it easier for those that seek to reuse CC-licenses tweets to do so correctly.

All in all, it is a fascinating idea and one that, though likely superfluous due to the nature of Twitter, will without a doubt bring a lot of comfort and certainty to what is still a very new medium. Though the most effective and simplest solution would still be to see Twitter itself integrate CC licensing into its service, since that doesn’t seem to be likely at this time, this is a good user-generated attempt to solve the problem.

It was an inevitability. As Twitter has grown in popularity, both as a networking and as a promotion tool, it has become an increasingly enticing target for spammers.

To date, most of the Twitter spam has been of the auto-follow variety. A spammer sets up an account, links it with a site they want to promote and the proceeds to follow hundreds, if not thousands, of strangers. Those strangers not only get the follow notification, thus turning it into a form of email spam, but also are forced to click the link to the Twitter account to determine if it is one they want to follow back, thus exposing them to the advertisements.

As frustrating as these accounts can be, for the most part, these spammers have had little interest in creating a legitimate-looking Twitter presence. They typically post only a few tweets, usually filled with links to the destination site, and they attract almost no followers.

However, a new breed of Twitter users seems to be changing that. These users are creating Twitter accounts that aren’t spammers in the traditional sense, but are actually Twitter scrapers. These accounts grab results from Twitter search feeds and republish them.

The question, however, is whether these new bots are legitimate forms of Twitter expression or a new form of spam that needs to be stopped. Also, if it does need to be stopped, how can it be done?

From Haikus to Shut Ups

If you mention the word “Haiku” in your tweet. It is almost certainly going to wind up on the @haikutwaiku account. It doesn’t matter if you’re posting your latest haiku creation, discussing haikus or just using a hashtag with Haiku in it, the account picks it up and, currently, does not attribute the tweet back nor does it indicate that it is a retweet.

Every tweet in the account is, originally, from another user. For example, this tweet on the @haikutwaiku account is actually from @jennar. Likewise, this @haikutwaiku tweet is from @CobWebsStir.

The @haikutwaiku account is both very active, with nearly 200 tweets per day, and relatively popular, with over 700 followers as of this writing.

Twitter users, for the most part, seem to either tolerate or be oblivious to the copying of the @haikutwaiku account. Most of the discussion with the account has been positive. However, a few Twitter users, such as @timtfj, have expressed displeasure.

This isn’t to say that all Twitter scrapers are plagiarizing their tweets. Another scraper, @shutupmeg targets tweets with the keyword “shut up” and give attribution to the tweets, though it uses “(@username)” rather than the “RT @username” format.

However, the response to @shutupmeg has been much more hostile. This may be because the attribution informs more Twitter users that their tweets are being copied or the keyword in question may attract a more hostile kind of Twitter user.

Either way, these are just two of the wide variety of Twitter bots that are scraping search results and republishing them in a new account. It seems likely that the controversy has just begun.

Copyright, Plagiarism and More

The next obvious question is whether or not any of these scrapers can be accused of copyright infringement, as many spam blogs can? As I pointed out during the Tweetbacks controversy, most tweets don’t rise up to the requisite level of creativity needed for copyright protection. As a result, it is likely that these services don’t raise any direct copyright issues.

However, the @haikutwaiku service may be an exception. Since it targets haiku poetry, a format of literature that is both tweetable and has been ruled protected in the past, it is easy to see how one could reach the conclusion that its activity is an infringement, even though there may still be fair use issues.

Beyond the copyright issues, it is unclear what could be done to stop Twitter scrapers if it were so desired. The current terms of use at Twitter make no mention of auto-posting bots, something that would have likely outlawed WordPress plugins and other tools used by bloggers for getting posts into their Twitter stream.

The end result is that these scraper bots may be here to stay and, unless Twitter users are able to motivate Twitter itself to take some kind of special action, it doesn’t seem likely to change.

Conclusions

Though Twitter scraping is likely annoying, especially when it is plagiarized, the nature of Twitter works against resolving these issues through traditional means. Copyright claims on tweets will be dubious and any Twitter rules that would target these bots would likely ensnare other, more accepted uses of the service.

The real question is how will Twitter users react as these bots become more common? Right now the response is rather mixed, some users expressing outrage and blocking the bots in question, others are tolerating or even enjoying their presence.

The real test will be how these bots are accepted after the novelty has worn off and after spammers begin to use them for more devious purposes. Right now the bots are fairly benign, linking only back to themselves or to nothing at all. Once they are used for promotion of sites or products, attitudes will likely change.

In short, we’ve only seen the very beginning of both the Twitter scrapers and the battle over them. Over the next few months, this will likely be a space where things get very interesting, very quick.