Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Mark Cuban’s Twitter Bill: $510 a Word

cubanMark Cuban has owned the Dallas Mavericks for more than nine years, and during that time he’s racked up more than $1.5 million in fines from the National Basketball Association for various transgressions. But he’s still finding ways to plow new ground.

The latest: A $25,000 bill from the league for two messages, totaling 49 words, that he posted via Twitter on Friday night. Both tweets complained about the officiating in that night’s Mavericks-Denver Nuggets game.

Cuban’s response? This tweet, posted Sunday afternoon: “just found out got fined25k by nba.) nice.” And then, upon further reflection, he penned this beauty:

cuban-tweet

Cuban is now wondering aloud, via Twitter (of course) and his blog whether his tweets ought to be considered copyrighted–that is, whether blogs and other publications need his permission to reproduce the stuff he posts. I don’t think so, obviously.

But for what it’s worth, I did check Twitter’s terms of service, and was a little surprised to see that the micro-blogging service doesn’t exert any claim on its users’ work. That’s a refreshing change of pace compared to Twitter’s Web 2.0 peers.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik