Twitter Haiku Thieves
Posted by Qrystal on February 16, 2009 at 20:59.
Category: Miscellany. Tags: .
Today, I finally got around to reporting to Twitter Support the plagiarism of haiku that is occurring on twitter. Below is the content of the support request I sent, with a bit of extra emphasis added for better readability here.
I (and many others) have been concerned about a user by the name of @haikutwaiku who has been retweeting anything we post with the word “haiku” in it, without giving credit to the authors.
I had submitted a prior request for something to be done about the account, but that was back when I thought the main problem was that it was retweeting itself repeatedly, and I was worrying that such a thing was causing strain on [twitter’s] servers. Now it seems that haiku is becoming so popular that there is more than enough content coming in, and @haikutwaiku doesn’t resort to retweeting its own retweets anymore.
The problem has evolved, and it’s affecting more people in a more personal way. Some people simply aren’t tweeting haiku anymore:
ever since @haikutwaiku started aggregating twaiku without giving credit to the authors, i’ve been turned off posting twaiku here
— @moritherapy
while others are replying to or retweeting @haikutwaiku’s posts thinking that they belong to that account: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=@haikutwaiku
It is important to note that posts made by @haikutwaiku come from twitterfeed, which means no actual person is contributing anything original to the twitterverse (or replying to any replies to that account). I suspect that the account was set up as a service to help share the haiku, but without attribution, this is plagiarism! This really isn’t fair to those of us who take so much care in crafting beautiful works of poetry.
Here is a twitter search containing excerpts from conversations about @haikutwaiku, highlighting terms such as plagiarism, steal/stole, bot, attribution, and credit:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=plagiarism+OR+steal+OR+stole+OR+bot+OR+credit+OR+attribution+@haikutwaiku
Although it pains me to think that @haikutwaiku’s 700+ followers will miss the constant feed of haiku, the lack of attribution violates twitter’s terms of service…
… unauthorized “re-tweets” (poaching and posting other users’ updates) passed off as original content* (Does the asterisk mean there was something more to this rule? There is no clarification on the page!)…
…and it also offends many people whose words are being redistributed without attribution.
Thanks in advance for whatever you can do about this situation!
I will post updates to this post as they come in.
UPDATE: they acknowledged the request for support, but have deemed it solved after saying that they will “keep an eye on the account”. Maybe that’s just a way for them to stop the support ticket from re-prompting us to comment… or maybe that’s a way to sweep the notion under the rug. Maybe they’re just waiting for more people to complain. PLEASE ADD YOUR SUPPORT TO THIS SUPPORT! I implore you! and thank you.