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:
BREAKING NEWS: Twitter is hiding tweets reported stolen. And it's referring to the author as a "copyright holder" pic.twitter.com/DkteWMZ7zg
— Plagiarism Is Bad (@PlagiarismBad) July 25, 2015
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."