What Twitshirt Says About How We Live Now

So, another pass at printing tshirts based on Twitter utterances emerges, called Twitshirt.

The idea has some coolness, but is old ground. Remember @choicetweets? or EatSleepTweet? Or Reactee?

what am I doing, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

But the tumult about Twitshirt is about the use of other people’s tweets. Copyright law states that anything published is copyrighted by default, and unless a publisher — a twitterer — agrees to the use of his/her words, they are protected by copyright. So, a company like Twitshirt can’t make money from my tweets, without my say so.

But Twitter is a community that leans toward openness, and so this seems to run up against other norms. Or does it? Even if twitterers stated that their tweets were covered by creative commons type licensing, I’d bet that most would opt for a ‘no commercial use - with attribution - mash-up if you want’ sort of CC mode.

I suggest that others do what I have done. State your CC options explicitly in your Twitter profile:

Stowe Boyd (stoweboyd) on Twitter, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

After this is done, Tweetshirt may allow others to plant your tweets on tshirts, but they are breaking the law, and so are the folks buying them, if money changes hands without your agreement.

You might want to opt out of Tweetshirt, as well, but that appears to involve providing your Twitter username and password, which falls into that painful anti-pattern of use.

One obvious solution would be for Tweetshirt to ask my permission if and when someone wants to republish my timeless prose on a tshirt. After all, they know my twitter ID, so why wouldn’t they? At that point, I could ask for my $5.

Twitshirt, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

[PS I noticed that Techmeme has no story rising that touches on Tweetshirt, which suggests that Techmeme has become way to slow regarding fast-breaking memes. Memes move too fast, nowadays, for a media dosimeter like Techmeme to keep up.]