"Can't say no one makes money from twitter now. the nba does )," Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wrote, or "tweeted," on Sunday, after the National Basketball Association fined him $25,000 for comments made over the micro-blogging service Twitter.
"How do they not call a tech on JR Smith for coming off the bench to taunt our player on the ground ?," Cuban wrote on Twitter, referring to Denver Nuggets' J.R. Smith, who came off the bench to taunt the Mavericks' Antoine Wright after the latter missed a shot near the Nuggets bench. Denver beat Dallas 103 to 101.
The fine is small potatoes compared with previous ones the NBA has levied against Cuban, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Broadcast.com, which was sold to Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), as well as MicroSolutions, sold to CompuServe, before he bought the basketball team in 2000.
The recent slap-on-the-wrist over Twitter inspired Cuban to write on a blog post on his Blog Maverick Web site ruminating on copyright law in the age of social networking and requesting a little legal advice:
Here is a question for all you legal scholars out there. Is a tweet
copyrightable ? Is a tweet copyrighted by default when its published ?
Can there possibly be a fair use exception for something that is only
140 characters or less ?
I got to thinking about this when I tweeted about an NBA game. I
tweeted to the people who follow me. While I never asked that they not
distribute it to other tweeters, i did not give anyone permission to
republish my tweets in a commercial newspaper, magazine or website.
So when an ESPN.com or any other outlet republishes a tweet, have they violated copyright law ?
A bunch of blog readers commented on the seeming controversy, but the best response was: "It would be very difficult to tweet something that does not fall under the fair use exception to copyright rules." That rational response came from Cuban's brother Brian, an attorney who happens to work for him. We don't make this stuff up.
On Twitter, you can follow Mark Cuban
@mcuban, Brian Cuban
@bcuban and me
@MKFlynn. -
Mary Kathleen Flynn
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