UDRP Trademarking a "Tweet"? Covfefe, Future UDRP?

[offthehandle]

Anybody else see this today?

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/n...center-of-debate-over-tweet-copyright-w495510

Just suppose, someone reads a tweet that some famous person writes on twitter- then proceeds to register the domain name. Will the UDRP future include this sort of nonsense too?

So does Donald Trump "own" the rights and need his commission to his tweet too? lol.
covfefe is making T-Shirts.

I find this really to be crazy, interesting, debatable, stupid, maybe has some validity, wtf--- etc. Where do you draw the line?

The situation mines a gray area in the realm of copyright ownership in the social media age, with tweets in a precarious position since copyright law doesn't officially protect them from this type of appropriation.

Male could have filed a cease-and-desist against Green Box over the sale of the shirts and let a court determine the outcome; instead, the two teenagers talked Monday to reach a compromise in terms of compensation and credit.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

A really interesting question (thank you for pointing it out on here!), and (to me at least) the correct legal position is far from clear. I'm not (yet) allowed to post links as a new member, but if you Google TWITTERLOGICAL the first item that comes up is a long article on Twitter and Copyright (written back in 2009, by someone from a US law firm). It is worth a full read but essentially it says that the person who Tweets owns the material (Twitter does not), but to be copyrightable depends on content and it must involve creativity and originality and be substantial (difficult in 140 characters, maybe) and that a simple fact or an opinion could not be copyrighted. Did he create that new word (I guess), is that significant (hmmmm) and in any case he would have to take measures to protect the copyright. And nothing that I just wrote is significant so not copyrightable .
- Bob (I guess I should have stuck with the Intellectual Property Law MOOC I started but never did much on!).

ps I never heard did someone sell the Covfefe.com for a big value?

 

[consumers]

UDRP covers trademarks and not copyrights

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Ooops my bad. Thanks for the clarification!

 

[offthehandle]

"This means that a company can register a trademark for its business name, slogans, logos and other items that essentially brand the product or company. "

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/differences-between-copyright-trademark-3218.html

Seems to be overlap here.

So as all things can be argued over, which one is covfefe or a tweet someone creates then prints shirts? Copyright or trademark? If I were a lawyer, (I'm not) it seems to me that a lawyer could go to argue a slogan like the example above UDRP since it seems undefined such as a trademark not copyright of a slogan like for example "Just do it" is "owned by nike".

I will go and read the article. thanks! Here is the link.

http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/