Image by Kacper Pempel/Reuters

Twitter removes plagiarized jokes, sparking copyright debate

Joke about a juice cleanse on Twitter, and you just might begin a national conversation on copyright laws. The Twitter account @PlagiarismBad, which spots plagiarized tweets, pointed out on Saturday that several users’ tweets had been removed after copying this joke from freelance writer Olga Lexell:

Lexell noticed users tweeting the joke without attribution and filed a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) through Twitter’s web form, asking them to remove the tweet on copyright grounds. Twitter removed some of the plagiarized tweets and displayed a message in their place that the tweet was “witheld in response to a report from the copyright holder.” Lexell explained why she filed the claim to The Verge:

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.

As the story picked up coverage on several national news websites, Lexell tweeted that she was getting messages that she was “censoring their free speech and that I ‘can’t copyright words.'”

Others came to her defense, voicing their support on Twitter.

Twitter’s Help Center states that “repeatedly post[ing] other users’ account information as your own,” including their tweets, constitutes spam. The site has removed thousands of tweets for copyright infringement; last year, it received 25,000 notices of copyright infringement, up 81 percent from the year before. Once a user’s tweet is removed on copyright grounds, they can file a counter notice to contest it within 10 days. Lexell commented on Twitter that the incident has gained more attention than she expected: