TweetCC.com - Twitter & Creative Commons

There is something that has not been addressed until now: the licensing of tweets. That is, Twitter has no intellectual property rights over the contents posted by its users, and we all know that. But what about the ones who create these contents, IE the twitterers? Should republishing a tweet without asking beforehand be freely done? TweetCC is a new solution that aims to make it possible for anybody to offer his tweets under a Creative Commons license. In other words: anyone that wants to reproduce a tweet can rest assured he can do so through this service.

To license your tweets, all you have to do is send a message to TweetCC including the phrase “I license my tweets under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication”. On the other hand, a search tool is included on the site, and it will let you realize whether any individual licenses his tweets or not.

The team hopes that Twitter will eventually include a policy along the lines of their service, and that this will redound to a better tweeting practice for all concerned parties. Until that time comes, there is TweetCC to fill in the gap.

“Publish & license tweets with Creative Commons.”

The licensing of tweets is not really an unimportant issue – far from it. Credit to the team behind this project for addressing it somehow.

Will Twitter ever offer a similar functionality by default?