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16th September 2008

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Choice Tweets

ChoiceTweets launched on September 12th. Today, the Internet found out, and it wasn’t impressed.

Briefly: ChoiceTweets make t-shirts with with tweets printed on them — here’s one example, and there’s a whole collection of shirts with Merlin Mann’s tweets on.

As far as I can tell, this is probably illegal. But I’m not a lawyer. At the very least, none of the Twitterers in question were asked for permission to repurpose their tweets.

I didn’t fall into the “not happy” crowd — unethical as it is, my tweets are hardly great works of literature — but I was curious about how they were getting away with it. The answer is that they’re not, it seems. There are numerous complaints in their support forum.

Because I’m a jackass, I sent them this e-mail:

I noticed that some of your t-shirts are using tweets of mine (@nostrich). Who should I speak to about arranging payment details for my commission?

To their credit (what little they have), their reply was very nice. They say they’re working to solve ownership issues — probably should have done that before opening the site, oops — and this:

we can look through our sales record and, if any shirts have been sold from your tweets, and if so, we can have you sign up for our affiliate program and append any tweets with your username. Unfortunately, we need to do this manually right now, so we’ll need some patience and understanding from you.

So if you’re one of those with their tweets being repurposed without permission, there’s your answer. There’s also this:

if you’re really worried about us profiting from your content without you seeing a cut in the mean time, we can remove your tweets from the timeline as well.

So there you have it.