Wait, so what do you still own?

“by submitting Content to Twitter”

What kind of content does this refer to?

If I have this worked out right, Twitter actually has no “Data Grants Program”.

Unless academic researchers are dumber than I think they are.

At least as offered on the app.

In short: “All your content are belong to Twitter.”

This dominance of big data owners over individual contributors is what Jaron Lanier is arguing against in “Who Owns the Future.”

I don’t belong to Twitter and don’t intend to join (I am allergic to social media) so I can’t click through.

But when you ask: “Is the issue that at least you still have the right to work on your ideas without Twitter’s permission?”

That I can answer – the answer is yes. You can do whatever you want with the Content – work on it, publish it, and license, transfer, etc. it to third parties without Twitter’s permission. That’s the meaning of “non-exclusive” in the second line. The effect is that Twitter’s rights are co-extensive with yours.

@Sam – nope this is _nothing_ like the GPL license. One of the main points of GPL is that you cannot take a work derivative of a GPL licensed work and license it via a non-free license (that’s similar to the “Share-Alike” provision in most Creative Common’s licenses). Twitter very much reserves the right to do just that.

@Sam and Adam, it’s somewhat like a permissive free software license, like the Apache license. Also similar to a copyright license agreement, which is a contentious topic in free software communities. Actually I think this literally is a copyright license agreement.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you send a letter (or application, document, etc.) to someone and you don’t write “Copyright X, all rights reserved” or specify licensing terms in your letter, then you are giving them unlimited permission to use it–de facto waiving copyright over it–anyway, so the effect would be the same. Except in that case, maybe the recipient couldn’t claim rights over it with respect to third parties (I’m not sure about this part), whereas the Twitter agreement means they ca.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you send a letter (or application, document, etc.) to someone and you don’t write “Copyright X, all rights reserved” or specify licensing terms in your letter, then you are giving them unlimited permission to use it–de facto waiving copyright over it–anyway, so the effect would be the same.

IANAL, but this isn’t my understanding. See e.g. here:

http://www.rightsofwriters.com/2011/02/sixteen-things-writers-should-know.html

which says what I was told a long time ago, which is that if I send you a letter, you own the paper it’s written on (heh) but I own the copyright. I don’t have to assert that right explicitly.

In a nutshell:
– you still own your stuff, and can do whatever you want with it
– they have a license to your stuff, and can also do whatever they want with it

As a few other people have pointed out, this is simultaneously quite extreme (they can use my ideas however they want!), and very standard practice, both in terms of service and in “permissive” open source licenses (though those typically require at least attribution).

It also isn’t completely nuts. Given how litigious people are over ideas, and given how hard it is for organizations to actually track how ideas flow within the organization, it can be pretty reasonable for an organization to say “tracking these ideas, and treating them specially/differently from all other ideas in our company, would be a pain in the ***, so you can either choose not to participate, or you can let us treat these ideas the way we treat everything else that comes in our walls.”

You or the owner of the Content still own the copyright in the Content, but by submitting Content to Twitter, you are granting Twitter an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid-up, fully transferable, perpetual and worldwide license to evaluate, use, copy, perform, display, publish, transmit, or create derivative works of the Content, or to authorize third parties to evaluate, use, copy, perform, display, publish, transmit, or create derivative works of the Content in any format and on any platform, either now known or hereinafter invented.

These legal advice guys are so lazy, methinks: it seems, among other things, that I retain an exclusive right to imitate, reproduce, echo, mirror, parrot, mimic, ape, disseminate, dispatch, relay, present, propagate, promulgate, scatter and flaunt derivative works of the Content. As these words better describe my research than those of the contract, I wouldn’t feel threatened.

This is boilerplate language from the contracts I’ve signed as a service provider to companies, all of which have a version of that language. It looks like they’re treating this as work-for-hire in terms of their rights, but are relaxing their exclusive rights to the ‘content’ by allowing applicants to retain it as well.

Either way, Ester is right to be concerned. It’s one thing to demand these rights as a condition for funding, but quite another to claim them over the proposal stage.

I read this as a standard Internet ToS copypasted to where it isn’t appropriate. Googling finds at least 26 websites with very similarly worded ToS’s, including The Guardian. Twitter is not a standard academic institution. It does not have any standard academic bureaucrats on staff. It does, however, retain lawyers with some background in ToS policy.

I now have to get a Twitter account to see their form. Dammit, I am trying to join as little social media as possible since my mother forced me to get a Facebook account.

I doubt they will be impressed by standard academic research forms either. Maybe I should send them a grant proposal in LOLspeak paragraphs of no more than 140 characters.

It’s very much not “standard practice” for academics, whose livelihood depends on their knowledge and ideas.

This is the exact opposite of the truth. The entire point of academia is to break the link between academics’ livelihood and their ideas, so that they can pursue the latter without worrying about the former.

So my answer to Ezster’s question would be: You still own everything that you, as an academic, have any reason to care about. As a scholar, you have already given up the moral right to exclude others from your work for your personal profit. That’s the other side of the social contract that gives you tenure, academic freedom, etc.

@26: The twitter license waives your right to be attributed for your ideas. Even as a scholar, you still have the moral right for this, especially when the research is not even done yet.

Moreover, the reality is that most academics do not have tenure, and in many places a tenure system does not even exist. So the answer actually is: you give up the only thing on which your livelihood as a scholar depends on.

adam.smith-

You’re right, I was arguing as if this were a CC license. So perhaps I overstated the case. But note that the question posed in the post is “What do you still own?”, not “What does Twitter now own?”. I agree that Twitter claiming a property right in academic work is potentially problematic, but limiting the property rights of scholars over their work seems perfectly appropriate to me and, in fact, a central norm of academia. (Of course that norm, like all norms, is sometimes violated in practice.) It doesn’t appear to me that this agreement limits the ownership rights of the researcher any more than, say, the requirement that NIH-supported work be published in an open-source journal. Which, I hope you’ll agree, is a good thing.

Frankly I find the idea that academics should “own” their ideas more threatening to scholarship than anything Twitter is doing.

Right, what Luis said.

I really am for open science, but you just gloss over the two points I made:

1. This isn’t about publications (which agree should be open access) but about initial ideas in forms of a grant, which means the academics haven’t received any credit for them and the ideas are at a stage where they can be scooped with relative ease. I have not heard of any proposals that would require making work publicly available at such an early stage. Would you favor a provision that requires all grant submissions to all public agencies to be open access? If we were to make such a case (and I think that would be hard) that would require a fundamental rethinking of what type of work academics are credited for, how we think of academic collaboration vs. competition etc.

and

2. This isn’t about the “social” but about a single company, which could, among other things, file patents based on work derivative of the grant applications and then charge the public for use of those patents (note how Twitter owns works derivative of the content submitted). Isn’t that the exact opposite of the social contract? If something belongs to the public, not to me, how can I grant a license to twitter to use it?

Frankly I find the idea that academics should “own” their ideas more threatening to scholarship than anything Twitter is doing.

If you want to think of this in more practical terms, replace “Twitter” with “Pfizer”. I think the claim that academics owning their work is being more threatening to the public good than the appropriation of publicly funded research for private gains at high costs to the public at large (software patents, pharma patents…) is rather daring.

adam.smith-

I think our disagreement is not about principles so much as about what this particular contract entails. It doesn’t seem to me that this contract allows Twitter to do anything that they could not do if the work were published under a CC license or were in the public domain. In particular, it doesn’t seem that Twitter has any right to exclude third parties from using the work. Sure, they can patent derivative work. So can anyone else, if you allow it. If I’m wrong about that, well, that would be a different story.

If something belongs to the public, not to me, how can I grant a license to twitter to use it?

If it’s in the public domain, you don’t have to grant Twitter a license to use it, they already can.

What adam.smith said. I’m surprised by people excusing Twitter’s “intent” (mark #15, luis #18 to some extent) or, if I read it right, minimizing it as copy-and-paste laziness. Whether or not it’s inappropriate copy-and-paste is irrelevant: a legal agreement is a legal agreement and its meaning is the words themselves, not anybody’s intent or lack of effort.

Also: what is this idea that a company can pre-vet research studies on what is, after all, its bread and butter? Will research proposals of the form “We hypothesize that twitter activity is positively correlated with agoraphobia” have as much chance of approval as “We hypothesize that twitter activity is positively correlated with personal success”? This looks like a marketing effort to better portray Twitter’s positive contributions to the well-being of society.

And third, sticking with the “all your Content is belong to us” theme, I liked this note from Ellery Biddle about Airbnb’s day of community service, in which the EULA says that by participating in “community service” you agree to be part of Airbnb’s advertising, so “turning the simple act of helping into a product.”

Tom @38 —yes. Though as I say above, I’d actually twist this around a little:

minimizing it as copy-and-paste laziness

I think copy-and-paste laziness doesn’t minimize but makes this worse, because it shows that, illustrated nicely by AirBnB, “all your Content is belong to us” has become the default position of the industry.
I find this much more alarming than the thought of a single company trying to scam academics.

Also: what is this idea that a company can pre-vet research studies on what is, after all, its bread and butter? Will research proposals of the form “We hypothesize that twitter activity is positively correlated with agoraphobia” have as much chance of approval as “We hypothesize that twitter activity is positively correlated with personal success”?

But Tom, this has nothing to do with the contract language. No matter how the rights to the work are assigned, Twitter is still going to have a choice of who to release its data to. If they are accepting proposals, they are pre-vetting by definition. The only way NOT to pre-vet would be to freely release their data to everyone who wants it. (Which would be the best policy, but again, has nothing to do with the specific language here.)

I recently read something – can’t now remember where – about the need for the Consumer Protection Agency to take action against unfair default contract language. This problem isn’t restricted to online business. Basically almost all the contracts that we legally engage in in everyday life were written by corporate interests to make sure that the customer practically has to sign away their legal rights before they can engage in a business transaction. There is no defense against this because all corporations do it. You are always “free” not to sing the contract but you can’t negotiate the terms of the contract and you won’t find another business partner that will accept fair contract terms.

Btw this is a prime example of why the libertarian contractualism is absurd: there are practically no freely negotiated contracts any more. If we have any contract rights left, it’s because of laws and regulations.

Several comments suggest that what Twitter offers is a CC-type license. I think this is broadly true, except for the lack of attribution requirement and the fact that Twitter (and its third-party sub-licensees) could make full commercial use of the Content and its derivatives (to the extent those are created by Twitter/sub-licensees), with no recompense to the licensor.

I note that the quoted language ignores the non-waivable moral rights enjoyed by creators under some European law; if the proposed license is to be enforced under US, that issue may be moot, depending on the specific phrasing of that clause.

Does anyone have a copy of the agreement that you don’t need a Twitter account to view?

Jake: I’ve copy and pasted it, appropriately enough, to Google Drive here. There are some links in it that are missing.

It sounds like Twitter doesn’t want to get sued by someone who submits a grant and then claims that their research idea got scooped depriving them of the Nobel Prize that was rightfully theirs.

Are they being paranoid? Maybe? Some prospective grant applicants are clearly worried about their ideas being stolen so it’s not entirely unfounded. If they hear from a bunch of people who say “I’d love to apply but I want some assurance that my proposal is not going to be leaked to my academic rivals” they might reconsider…

Yeah, Clause 2 is pretty clear:

Do not submit confidential information. Twitter will not keep your Content confidential, as your Content will be copied and distributed to many people at Twitter for evaluation. If you would like to keep your Content confidential, do NOT send it to Twitter.

I think Luis at 18 largely nailed it, though I agree with a lot of other points as well.

Does anyone know of a way for Twitter to protect, practically, itself from numerous potential lawsuits while agreeing to more restricted use of these proposals?

Scott Martens: I now have to get a Twitter account to see their form. Dammit, I am trying to join as little social media as possible since my mother forced me to get a Facebook account.

Just use mailinator to create a fake account. Hell create one for everyone in the thread.

Twitter has historically been really cagey about letting researchers examine their giant collection of tweets, so this is good news on that front. They cracked down pretty hard on people redistributing corpora of tweets and downloading them from Twitter isn’t easy either: they limit you to 180 API calls/15 minute window.

The terms do look a little daunting, but it also depends on your plan. If you’re submitting a brilliant machine learning idea, it does look like this would let them tip off their own researchers—and they might do that if your idea is good enough (it also lets them avoid drama if one of their own people independently heads down the same path). On the other hand, my friend is a political scientist who studies how people communicate about elections. Access to tweets would be very helpful for her, but it seems incredibly unlikely that she’d end up going toe-to-toe with a Twitter staffer at APSA.

Widmerpool: I’m puzzled. From what I can see, every other organization under the sun does exactly what Twitter is proposing to do, without the protections of this agreement. They accept applications, proposals and the like, and circulate them internally to the people who need to see them. I can’t see any reason why Twitter can’t manage this task beyond conformity to a pervasive Silicon Valley culture that demands every interaction from book reading to hitchhiking be wrapped around with a license agreement.

The only exception I’m aware of is Hollywood, where people actively state that they don’t look at submitted manuscripts for fear of law suits.

Harry b @25, JW Mason @ 26

Thanks for letting me know. I’ve obviously been doing academia wrong all these years. Who knew that my knowledge and ideas had nothing to do with it?

I’m trying to game this out here. Let’s say I wanted to compare positive:negative ratio of the (public) replies to tweets on feminism vs. tweets on the Philadelphia Phillies.

(My underlying hypothesis might be something like: While social/political issues and athletic fandom both inspire passionate beliefs and partisanship, sports disagreements on Twitter are rarely as directly physically threatening or personally contemptuous as feminism debates.)

Let’s further assume that in my imaginary application to Twitter, I am proposing some relatively novel, useful, and practical way of culling and analyzing relevant tweets.

What Twitter is apparently saying is that my submission of an application grants them the right to take my data-gathering/analysis approach, patent it, and sell it to the government of Uganda to use in identifying and prosecuting LGBT rights activists. Or, closer to home, Twitter could sell my approach to Merck for them to use in going after anti-cervical-cancer-vaccine activists.

Yes? Or am I missing something important?

(In case it isn’t obvious, I’m on the side that says this is laziness + malfeasance on Twitter’s part.)

“every other organization under the sun does exactly what Twitter is proposing to do, without the protections of this agreement.”

That’s not correct. No technology company will look at publicly submitted ideas without some variation on this in place – all public bug trackers/feature request systems of any halfway-competently run tech company will have this sort of language in place, for example. It’s for exactly the same reasons as Hollywood, because lawsuits over this sort of thing are not hypothetical (or at least weren’t until this practice became widespread).

why can’t they treat this the same as other copyrighted material?

Because randomly available copyrighted material usually isn’t copied verbatim in widely-disseminated/presumably intense internal discussions, and isn’t directly solicited from the author, and isn’t specifically written to be about very specific, particular aspects of their business. Those factors all increase the risk that the author will sue you, so (again) any competently-lawyered tech company, when faced with those situations, will get a waiver of this sort.

They will put protections in place if they are working specifically with information that is difficult to obtain, expensive, rare, etc. – but it is understood that those protections are extremely costly and should only be taken when absolutely necessary. “We’re doing a favor to some academics by giving them access to our data” does not fall into the “absolutely necessary” case.

“this is a prime example of why the libertarian contractualism is absurd: there are practically no freely negotiated contracts any more.”

Agreed. I suspect this might not be acceptable/enforceable in Europe as a result of the directive on unfair terms in consumer contracts, probably depending primarily on whether something as niche as this is actually a consumer contract for purposes of the directive or not.

why can’t they just solve this by publishing the data under an open license, and not pre-screen the academics?

I’m merely speculating here, but I suspect that they are concerned about privacy issues – reidentification continues to advance by the day, so simply saying “anonymize it and then open it up” may not be very reassuring to them. They’ll likely want contractual limits on privacy/reidentification that can’t be present in an open license. (They may also want non-commercial restrictions, which I agree are indefensible in the academic context.)

concerns about pre-publication access

Agreed that these concerns are real. On the flip side, so are Twitter’s concerns about getting sued – for doing someone the favor of giving away data that they could have just sat on! If it helps, think past the contract and about Twitter’s incentives: yes, it is possible that they could end up leaking this to a “competitor” in the brutal tenure game. This contract permits them to do it, but they don’t have much incentive to do it – doing that doesn’t help their business. The situation where they turn your idea into a product (or more likely an internal research project) is somewhat more likely; there are likely a lot of internal incentives for them to run with it. At the same time, if it is actually a really unique and innovative idea, and they want to build it/turn it into a product, they also have a lot of incentive to reach out to the author and work with them on it, which will likely lead to a lot of good things for the author (better data access, more publication opportunities, jobs, cash) – something that happens all the time in Silicon Valley. So, yes, the contract lets them screw you over during the brief window where you’re trying to protect your pre-publication idea – but the odds of it, in practice, aren’t very high.

None of this is to say that you should sign it, Ezter! If you don’t like the restrictions, don’t play ball, and look for data from other social networks. It’s just to say that leaping to a “Twitter is an evil thief, this is outrageous” conclusion also isn’t very justifiable.

Wishing for a delete option @67. Jake and Luis covered it.

Luis #66: I see what you mean about feature submissions, though I think they’re different in important ways.