Are my tweets my intellectual property? Answers lawyers do not give

If there is anything that Paris Hilton has taught us it is this; our ability to generate original expression is now limited. Our words are up for sale and if we take the lawyers view, our tweets should be protected like a sacred object of creation.

This is not for the lawyers, they’ve already pressed their argument well (“That’s Hot”, like, seriously??).

This is for us lay-folk. Are our tweets our intellectual property? If I take what you have written within a 140 character limit (which has taken some effort on your part), and pass it off as my own, have I stolen something from you?

Days and weeks go by before we have those moments of brilliance and we tweet words unique to us; not in their origin but in their configuration. What was once the purview of writers, poets and coders is now the common place banality of every day thought, and its gone digital. Which means it is permanent.

To call a spade a spade (has anyone trade-marked that as yet?), expression is freedom, and freedom should never have been handed out so carelessly as the ‘Facebook’ wall paradigm. That’s a different argument for a different day. Now that it is within the purview of every man, woman and idiot: free and unique expression can sometimes be liberating when done right in a digital world. ‘Micro-blogging’, that blanket of credibility provided to anyone with a computer and a few words of English to write, brings with it the conundrum of our times: your freedom now ends where my retinal veins begin. And it is not ok.

If what we write is our intellectual property, what we tweet should also be ours to own and protect via the maze of IP law and trade-mark protection. Original is now so utterly muddled with the vague, derived and contrived (not to mention badly written) that one wonders if the madness of social media may lead to the ‘de-regulation’ of expression. Writers, thinkers, creators and ad men of repute will suffer. 140 characters is the perfect window for some truly thoughtful, novel and crafty word usage. It is also the perfect window to appreciate the debate over what is, and is not, sacred creation to be protected by law.

Because (as Ms. Hilton has shown us) the shorter it is, the easier it is to grab it and claim it. In the glitz and blitz of competing tweets and unique expositions, it is time we got some clarity on where social media ends, and the knowledge of interactivity begins.