If the tweet copies something that already exists then there is
no copyright in the tweet - if the thing that is copied has copyright protection then the tweet itself may be a violation.
As a consequence of this fuss, ESPN republished Cuban's Twitter feed without obtaining his permission, giving rise in the blogosphere and the twitterverse to much speculation about whether in so doing ESPN had infringed on his copyright, and, more baldly, whether there is
copyright in a tweet anyhow.
Not exact matches
As the
tweet suggests, the mistake is a common one and pops up almost every time news outlets report on a celebrity owning such and such a word or phrase (the Queen Anne
in the
tweet, by the way, refers to the British monarch who presided over the UK's first
copyright law).
Also, (i) the 2018
copyright date at the end of the video, (ii) the absence of Bandai Namco (who developed Smash Bros. 4) next to that
copyright notice, (iii) the new Smash Bros. title logo, (iv) the presence of brand new characters, (v) the working title
in Nintendo's press release, and (vi) the recent
tweet from Sakurai that he has been working on this game
in secret for some time point pretty definitively to this being a new Smash Bros..
A
tweet is like a yodel, perhaps, only smaller — but equally able to kick up a fuss about
copyright, this time more
in the abstract.
Weekly Axis Of Easy # 37
In this issue: Belgian court orders Facebook to stop collecting personal data Google Chrome's ad blocker may give preferential treatment to... Google US Federal judge rules embedding a
tweet may be
copyright infringement UK police commence «on - the - spot» fingerprint scanning.