Joke thieves beware. Twitter has removed several humorous tweets that appear to plagiarise other people’s work, on copyright grounds.
Comedians have long been frustrated at hearing their jokes retold, without attribution. But now Twitter appears to be offering them a way of fighting back – and claiming their words as their own.

The joke that brought the issue into focus went like this: “Saw someone spill their high end juice cleanse all over the sidewalk and now I know god is on my side,” It was written by Olga Lexell, a freelance writer in Los Angeles. For those not accustomed to the diet of metropolitan hipsters, it’s a dig at health fanatics who pay small fortunes for detox drinks.

Lexell tweeted the joke in early July. In the days that followed it appeared many more times on Twitter, simply copied and pasted by other accounts with no accreditation. But those duplicate tweets have since been hidden by Twitter – replaced with the message “This tweet has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder”. The notification was first spotted by the Twitter account @PlagiarismBad, which exists to flag up plagiarism on Twitter, and even adds offenders to a public list list it calls “Tweet Thieves”.

Read the Full Article: Source – BBC News
Browsing Privacy: (BBC News) – Why are some jokes being hidden on Twitter?

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