I normally don’t may much attention to Web site terms of service. Usually it’s a race to get to the bottom of the terms so I can click the “agree” button and get started with whatever I’m doing. With Twitter’s TOS, however, I was glad to see they clarified the issue of “who owns your tweets?” Thankfully, as @Biz confirmed yesterday, the answer is, “you do.”
Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.
Now I’m no big city lawyer, but it seems to me that while your tweets remain your intellectual property, Twitter could still, given the terms of the TOS, publish a book of the greatest tweets and profit from it without reimbursing users. However, given the controversy over Facebook’s revised TOS earlier this year, Twitter users and those who value privacy should be able to take comfort in the fact that if they delete their account, Twitter won’t own the deleted tweets.
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