News in Grand Rapids, Michigan, were dominated this week by local sports, a debate on wage increases for workers who receive tips and a man who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor to encourage her dog for killing a raccoon. But there was also some controversy Newsroom inside the local newspaper of Grand Rapids Press: as Quotable is Twitter?
An entertainment reporter, Rachael Recker, has written an article where you mentioned various Twitter users and identified by username. For those of us accustomed to printing tech, this is not a surprise--but for a local newspaper, unorthodox territory. Recker was met with criticism from readers as well as some Twitter users mentioned, that, according to a published column earlier this week the release of Grand Rapids, thought that the journalist "wasn't doing a complete job reporting, since you do not contact them personally for a quote ...(e) questioned whether it is appropriate to use tweets in a story online without specifically asking for permission.
This minicontroversy--whether something is published on the Web, making it open for quoting automatically within the realm of copyright restrictions?--is not limited to Twitter. One-to-one email should be private. So should instant messages. In addition, it gets messy.
Questions and answers site Quora has a little known where users can mark their responses, many of which are large and detailed, as "not for reproduction." Facebook, encouraging more and more public content, says in its terms of service that users grant "a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensing, royalty free, worldwide," to what they say and upload to your social network, but is very fuzzy on details when it comes to citations and reproduce such content outside of Facebook. The Web has just flooded the world with the printing of the content, it is flooded with new types of content--public and semipublic e-mail lists, Facebook groups, blog comments, responses on questions and answers--and the old rules of quotability does not always fit.
But here is to start somewhere: If something is public, is Quotable. If you do not want to be quoted, not to say that on the Internet. If you have a Twitter account and say something, then, Yes, it is public. Should Twitter users expect to be contacted and asked for permission to have their tweets reprinted? Don't count on it.
You can get a little more complicated, obviously. Quora requires users to be logged in before they can find something, this means that the content is not fully public, and on Facebook is hard to say what is not hidden behind any sort of restriction contacts-coordination-workers alone or unless you log out and reload the page to see if it is still visible. In both cases, citing is significantly more ambiguous than on Twitter.
Then there's panoply of Web of semi-public mailing lists, services, forums and groups galore. I came across this headlong when, in a story earlier this year, I mention a post from a user, NextNY mailing list e-mail that you have been in 2006 and in my memory has adhered without problems; openly urges membership list on its Web site, not lists of any reprint policy and has more than 3,000 members. I contacted you to ask permission, but hasn't heard back and with an expiring soon decided to run with it. The user ultimately got back to me and asked if would like to dissociate his name from the summons. Digging a little deeper, I learned that NextNY archives are not indexed in search engines, and while membership is shame, verified with a trustee that new users must be approved by a moderator. That was not "public" enough for me. I run a correction.
That was an instance where the situation was ambiguous, but now I have a new rule for dealing with mailing lists and forums mentioning in future--and now I encourage my colleagues and acquaintances who administer e-mail lists to come up with policies for republishing content if you don't already have them. Journalists are not the only ones who publish on the Web; a line from an email list could easily be reproduced semi-public and distributed by anyone with a Twitter account or blog.
But in the event of an accident, the Grand Rapids Press side Rachael Recker--how does your employer. "For the record, we look at tweets fair game for publication, unless they appear in a direct message. Same goes for Facebook that are accessible to the public, "explained the newspaper column. "Almost everyone on Twitter retweets interesting comments, and nobody asks permission to do so. Six observations of the person sharing with potentially thousands of people, depending on whether it is retweeted again. "
(Or, potentially millions, if Ashton Kutcher meets your tweet and decide that it discovers brilliant).
The Web is forcing us to redefine what is public and what is private in many cases. Often we don't know who might be listening, and we can never be sure who might be able to transmit such information to the masses. In 5 or 10 years, maybe we have known rules and guidelines for the treatment with quoting and republishing digital media--but not yet. GigaOM writer Mathew Ingram may have summed up best in a tweet, that now I'm quoting (how meta!) where he he riffed on Quora policy "not to reproduction".
"Here's a tip for those who use the thing is not to play ' on Quora," wrote Ingram. "We don't want your answer above? Don't put it on the Internet. "
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