Andy Clarke (@malarkey) and Brian Suda (@briansuda) have produced TweetCC, which is a scheme whereby people can list their twitterstream and their tweets as being licenced by Creative Commons, so that they may be re-used.

This came about because…

Andy wanted tweets and avatars for a new book. His publisher needed him to get permissions to republish and that meant asking everyone. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, a pain. Brian agreed.

It would be nice if twitter could allow for a CC or other license on your content, then people don’t have to ask.

TweetCC

That’s a fair point, particularly as theoretically, and re-tweet without permission may be a breach of copyright. Andy also wanted to look at the question of licencing avatars and so on — again so that they can presumably be printed in said book. This whole idea of licencing your tweets is a bloody good idea, with the most annoying part being that as usual I didn’t come up with it.

However, the implication of the homepage is that tweets can only be released under a public domain licence — this is not the case, and indeed the TweetCC ‘CC’ page states that you are free to use whichever licence you wish.

For example, if you want people to be able to re-use your tweets, but to have to give you the appropriate credit for them, not be able to change them, and not be able to use them commercially, you should use the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works licence. Many people may be wary about giving away their rights as regards commercial use of their tweets — if someone is going to make money out of them*, shouldn’t they be entitled to a share?

*not likely, is it?

Of course, this is not really a help to Malarkey’s book project, but I rather suspect he sees TweetCC as something bigger than that, rather than just a means to an end. So what you should do is look at the creative commons licences and decide which is most appropriate for you.

It is also not clear (as yet) how someone can — or should — go about licencing use of their Twitter avatar, or indeed whether they want to licence any photos they post via Twitpic. But I am sure that the Modfather is on the case and a solution will be made clear soon.

Meanwhile, pick the terms under which you would like to licence your tweets — if of course you would, you are under no obligation to do so after all — and send a tweet to tweet CC as:

@tweetcc: I license my tweets under a Creative Commons [licence type] licenseTweet format from TweetCC

Update: although the @foamcow raises a valid point…

@Malarkey But how would I know if they HAD used them. It’s easy to take stuff out of context and I’d hate to be misquoted.@foamcow

Well, @foamcow, I’ve contacted you directly to mention I’m using this, so hopefully you won’t mind — and if you do object I’m quite happy to remove it. I think in this case the tweet is placed in the appropriate context and so makes sense…