Can You Copyright a Tweet?

Interesting enough. But let's take a step back. Sure, a single tweet may not be copyrightable, but what about timelines?<p>Couldn't someone consider their Twitter timeline to be a body of work? Think about Fake Micheal Bay, Darth Vader, or other fake users who exist solely for entertainment purposes. No single tweet is important, however the image they convey of the character is described in these 140 character chunks. Pretty much a work of fiction.<p>It would be like trying to say that words and sentences can't be copyrighted because they are too small to comprise anything substantial, but ignoring books, songs, plays, etc.<p>A case for missing the forest for the trees.

Let's rephrase the question: can you copyright aphorisms? Because Tweets are no different than other bodies of written work except for their length.<p>The author seems to pick out a bunch of straw-men, or, ahem, straw-tweets if you like, to point out as un-copyrightable. He then moves on to say that he has yet to see a single copyrightable tweet. It would be more interesting if he picked out genuinely interesting tweets and argued why even they didn't pass muster.<p>Yeah, you can't copyright facts. But you can copyright certain stylized restatements of facts. You're copyrighting the specific and unique utterance, not the fact itself.<p>The author even concedes that you could possibly copyright a tweet if it was a haiku. I've seen plenty of tweets that embody the same kind of concise harmony as haikus.

Note that this partly specific for US law, not all countries require registration for copyrighted material.

No doubt, most individual tweets don't rise to the level of copyright protection.<p>But he hides the strong counterexample until his second-to-last paragraph: established law confirms tiny poems, specifically haiku, are copyrightable.<p>And he ignores the interesting question about related strings of tweets. Individual letters aren't copyrightable; string enough together and you have everything else that is copyrightable.<p>He spent all his words on the trivial matters!