ChoiceTweets

Hey everyone! As comments continue to roll in, pleased with our new roadmap, we’ve got a few more questions that we’re interested in getting more thoughts on.

There was a brief mention in one of the comments prior about “overheard” and “retweet” style tweets, where the author of the tweet and the originator of the content are not the same. Clearly, we don’t have any way of reaching out through twitter to the person the twitter author overheard, tapping them on the shoulder, and asking them to sign a release. Or do we? Should we?

This entire discussion raises the question, how many layers of attribution are there, and how effective is the current copyright at protecting those who are being attributed?

You’ve all been so vocal already, so please: discuss!

We’ve been actively following both sides of the conversation about the copyright infringement issues. We’re discussing a few different possible workflows that will address the major outstanding issues:

• There is no mechanism for authors to “opt in” to allow their shirts to be purchased. We’ve taken a reactionary stance, short term, while deciding how we move forward.
• While many authors have said that they don’t mind so long as we give attribution, others understandably are upset about the potential for us to make profit without their inclusion or permission.

Many of the comments we’ve received are that the idea is good, but some pieces of it were not completely thought through. We are working hard to improve the site so that content creators are back in control of their content as related commercial use.

Actions

We’ve been blacklisting accounts upon request while we determine an efficient and effective way to notify authors of their tweets going on shirts without it turning into spam. We appreciate that many people have been civil about their requests.

This morning we have temporarily removed the “buy this shirt” link from the website. We did not want it to appear as if we were attempting to “stall” the issue”. In the mean time, people can still “mock up” tweets on shirts, but not purchase them.

Moving forward, our goal is to continue to allow people to create shirts, and then give them ways to request permission from the author to have it go for sale. No unapproved shirts will be able to be sold.

Thank you again for everyone’s feedback, this continues to be a very interesting discussion and we apprecaite everyone’s insight.

The last 24 or so hours have been pretty interesting. For those of you who haven’t yet been following along, we’ve been under siege from a number of directions, including our feedback forum, email inquiries, and of course, twitter itself. People are concerned about the possibility of copyright infringement.

While we sort this out, we’ve begun removing tweets from our catalog and adding user accounts to a blacklist at the request of the content owners. You can request that by sending an @ message or direct message to the @choicetweets account on twitter.

First off, we apologize for any distress we caused anyone. We humbly admit to our fault of having made a mis-step in our thoughts of how our utility would be used. We never meant to be abusive of user’s content. We’re interested in content mashups, social interactions, and our medium: t-shirts. We thought the idea was fun. We didn’t think of it as pillaging your content, and clearly, that was a mistake. For that, we sincerely say we’re sorry.

At this point, there appear to be a few different camps:

• people who like the idea but are upset about the copyright abuse
• people who like the idea and don’t feel like they are being infringed upon
• people who hate the idea because they think it is lame
• people who hate the site because the principal of infringing copyright
• people who don’t know what being infringed feels like, so they continue going about their day.

We’re curious, which are you? We still think our idea has a chance, but we know we need to go about it in a new way. Our interest of extended content off the screen and into the real world still exists, and enough people think the idea is compelling for us to stand by it. But we want to do right by the content owners.

Another question we have is, are you upset that:

• your material is printed on a shirt
• we’re profiting
• we’re profiting and you are not

We don’t want to make the mistake of jumping to conclusion of what people are actually upset about, so we need to hear from you.

The namecalling on the user feedback forum suggests that we “die”, and”F*%k off”. Clearly, we’re not planning on doing either of those things. Instead, we want to be thoughtful about this issue, so we’d appreciate it if you were too.

The next series of posts, we hope, will help distill the real issue with the site and help us decide our next direction. In the mean time, we believe that the biggest concern is that we’re making profit from your content. While we’re still fielding takedowns, but while this conversation is going on, we’re going to take 100% of the profit and donate it to the EFF. We realize that we’ve inadvertently stirred a very interesting issue regarding copyright infringement feel that the EFF is be the most appropriate resource to support with profit generated by selling our shirts.

We sincerely believe that there is a silver lining to this cloud, and that is a valuable discussion to be having together. We look forward to resolution through discussion with all of you.