Twitter is finally stepping up and taking down tweets of stolen jokes. Hopefully this means an end to those "parody" accounts of Chris Rock and Will Ferrell.

The account @PlagiarismBad, who acts as a weirdly obsessive watchdog of joke plagiarism on Twitter, recently noticed that the website started hiding tweets reported as stolen:

As seen in the screenshot above, the original joke (which, let's face is, is a C-joke at best), written by Olga Lexell was simply copy/pasted by other users without attribution. She explained on her account on Saturday her reasoning for the takedown request:

I simply explained to Twitter that as a freelance writer I make my living writing jokes (and I use some of my tweets to test out jokes in my other writing). I then explained that as such, the jokes are my intellectual property, and that the users in question did not have my permission to repost them without giving me credit.

And yeah, most of those accounts that stole her joke were basically those spam accounts that we too-often get retweeted into our timelines. Lexell told The Verge that it wasn't the first time Twitter responded to her takedown request.

Twitter allows anyone to submit a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) through a web form, and it gives accused offenders 10 days to respond.

Under Twitter's terms of service, it says, "We will respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement that comply with applicable law and are properly provided to us."

Lexell, suffering from some undue attention, has since locked her account and changed her Twitter bio to read, "writer who brought up a point about intellectual property."

The always-vigilant Bay Area Transit News gets credit for pointing out the apparant Xeroxing. Only a few words were changed between his letter published on September 5th and the one published yesterday; that's a shame, because both versions could use a more vigorous proofreading. For example, David decries the "adverse impact ... on the community" of having dedicated bus lanes, but never says what that might be, probably because "faster service" and "less traffic" doesn't sound all that adverse. "Let's fix Muni before fixing what's not broken along the Geary corridor," he writes, twice, but has he ever freaking ridden a 38 from downtown to the beach? It takes nearly an hour during peak times. Not to mention, all that traffic makes Geary like a miserable unwalkable strip of Los Angeles. Yes, by all means, let's fix Muni; and since the Geary Merchants are apparantly so eager for attention, let's start by streamlining transit in their neighborhood.

After the jump: the two letters for comparison.

Today's victim of the SFist interview has only been in our fair city for a couple of weeks, but that doesn'r mean we're going to take it easy on him! His new book, , is a easily-digestible and very, very funny history of booze and drinking, and it comes out tomorrow!

We here at SFist welcome Ian to San Francisco and eagerly anticipate the day he ventures out of his living room and into the rest of our fair city.

What initially attracted you to this subject matter? Sure, lots of folks like to drink, but how did that translate to your writing this book?
Well, I know this is the pat answer, but I seriously spent more time in college "researching" alcohol than I did in classes. I figured it was time to put to my knowledge to good use. I mean, it actually did strike me that when you first start hanging out in bars, there’s a whole world of knowledge that you start learning (Why’s there a 33 on a rolling rock bottle? Why’s there a bat on bacardi rum bottles? Why does Budweiser suck?). And every time I went into bookstores, the books on alcohol were always written by these really wanky wine people that bore no relation to the sort of people that make it fun to hang out in a bar.

What was your process in researching and writing this book? You allude to using friends to help you, then to double and triple checking your facts -- walk us through this.
Plagiarism. Forgery. Deceit.

As I said above, there’s a lot of oral history (wink wink nudge nudge) running around any bar. So I started with all the stuff I’d picked up and actually looked to see if it was true or not. Then I just started reading lots of history books. You know how they spend all of the 6th grade teaching you about the fertile crescent in Egpyt and you’re not sure why you should give a crap? Well, it was a lot more interesting to read about once I found out that civilization quite literally started there because that’s where grapes for wine and grain for beer grew the best. History’s much more intersting to read about when you realize that the 20th century was by far the most sober one in history. By a country mile.

When working on this book, did you fall in love with
any new drinks?
Sadly, the one I really, really, really wanted to try is no longer around-– Vin Mariani, from the late 1800’s. It was bordeaux wine with cocaine leaves soaked in it. It was so good the Pope gave the inventor a Vatican medal of honor and officially endorsed the drink in an ad. I’ll type that again because it’s so awesome: The Pope! Did an ad! For cocaine wine! Because he drank it so much!

Good times.

Fall out of love with any others?
There are no bad drinks, just bad drunks.

Do you really think TiVo is just a "fad"?
I don’t know, but if mine doesn’t stop taping friggin’ bass fishing shows, I’m gonna fad its ass out onto the street. [shouting across the room to tv] You hear me, TiVO?! Huh?! I’m not playing!!

What are you working on now?
Another children’s book. My first one just came out this month as well– An Undone Fairy Tale. And I know that’s a shameless plug, but it’s true. It was just weird timing. I wrote a children’s picture book and a non-fiction book on alcohol a year apart, and they both end up coming out in the same month.