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The "platform" that Twitter is restricting access to is a website, with a bunch of content put on it by users of that website. IANAL, but I don't see what rights to that data could possibly be claimed by a third party.


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I'm not too familiar with the Twitter terms of service, but I would be surprised if selling access to their data wasn't a clear violation.

that seems like a fairly meaningless semantic point. twitter controls the access to the data, therefore it is their data. all the copyright means is that tweet authors are free to take the content of their tweets and put it somewhere else.

They're not Twitter's users. They are independent publishers publishing their information on the open web, and Twitter is rentseeking.

It'd be the same as a web host prohibiting certain browsers, or trying to block you from publishing RSS.


IANAL. You still own the content you create, including your tweets, but by tweeting that content Twitter can do basically whatever they want with that data too.

If I wanted to publish a website of your tweets, I believe I could contact you and get your permission, or I negotiate the rights through Twitter, like using their third party API.


How the hell did they even have access to this data?

Twitter isn't a 6 month old startup. How is there not strict access controls in place?


Twitter wants this both ways, they say it's the users' data when requested to turn it over, but they say it's their data when a user wants to use a 3rd party client to access it.

Likely there's a small mountain of trackable and connected data in Twitters datacenters that they can act on.

But this is a private company with their relevant terms and conditions, and not a court of law. They are therefor not required to publicize private company data.


They determine how I am allowed to display the Tweet. That just plain sucks. For me it is a biggie.

If Twitter wouldn't own the Tweets, how could they make the rules for the way I am allowed to display them?


Why would they? Most sites TOS already stipulate that by uploading data to the service, you grant a global irrevocable unlimited license to use all submitted data for any business purpose without your further consent. I'd be surprised if Twitter didn't have this for years.

Wouldn't Twitter be able to see who access was delegated to? It sounds like they'd just ban the app rather than all its users.

Is Twitter's policy that the users do own their tweets? I never heard that claim before. I would have assumed not.

- They have a Twitter account?

- They use Twitter resources?

- They use Twitter's platform?

- If Twitter went down, they wouldn't be able to post their Tweet?

> It'd be the same as a web host prohibiting certain browsers, or trying to block you from publishing RSS.

You have a wild imagination.


> “All the content of Twitter.com belongs to Twitter’s owners,” Castaño explained in a tweet. “Who am I to sell little bits of the domain to anyone?”

Isn't that kind of the problem? Maybe we should be exploring protocols that let users own the content they create.


You have signed over the right to Twitter, not random third parties. They are not using Twitter's embed API to render the content, but even if they did it wouldn't automatically absolve them from having to get permission. Plenty of courts have already ruled on this in the copyright owner's favor (specifically for Twitter and Instagram embeds in fact).

It is likely not up to Twitter but rather DMCA related.

I know nothing about Twitter's patents. Wouldn't something like this infringe upon them?

I thought it might be something like that. Twitter needs to fix this or developers like you will be facing the consequences of their actions. Facebook's permissions are much more granular.

I'm gonna guess it often isn't even their content but is user content they are protecting. So, sounds like a big subsidy/protection racket for Twitter or whatever to train on their users' public content but not let others.

Umm, can't just Twitter disallow this in their EULA and delete all users who engage in this behavior? Besides, doesn't Twitter have some kind of intellectual ownership of tweets posted there, so a competitor can't just scrape the site and display the results as their own?
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