Does it feel like your X account belongs to you and you can do whatever you want with it? That’s not true, according to a new court filing from the social media company formerly known as Twitter. It’s an argument that X is making in order to throw a wrench in The Onion’s recent purchase of InfoWars, the conspiracy theory media company run by Alex Jones. And it’s a great reminder that you don’t actually own what you think you own in the digital age.
I mean, if someone lets me into their house, points me to a whiteboard with a pen and tells me to write whatever I want so the other people in the house can read it…
Do I own the whiteboard? Or the pen? Or have control over any of it?
No. The owner of the house can lock me out and wipe off or change what I wrote at their leisure.
You do have some control, in the form of copyright. Also the analogy doesn’t hold up well since you’re not using their “pen” and they only let you reach inside through the window. And the audience is outside the house.
Except when you enter the home, you accepted the TOS that transfers copyright to the owner of the home.
Nope.
as a user, “you retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours you own your Content (and your photos and videos are part of the Content),” although you also grant Twitter a license to use the content, which authorizes it “to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.” Based on this language, other twitter users are also licensed to copy and redistribute your posts by “retweeting” them.
https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/tweets-protected-copyright/
A better analogy is i hand you a bullhorn and you shout at randos.
Do i own your words, even though it’s my bullhorn? No.
No but somebody else can own the creator of what was written on the board. That might be a bit weird in today’s terms if it’s a person, but if it’s a company that wrote that stuff it can legally become somebody else’s, which is what is happening with Infowars.
Twitter has always allowed a company to own their own account, and even transfer it and be used by multiple people. For example how Biden’s account is used by his staff. But now X starts meddling with this specific case, which is very questionable.
And if you’re going to say that “it’s his own account”; lawyers were saying that his “personal brand” is too heavily intertwined with Infowars and that it should be part of the Infowars brand.
