English: Jack Dorsey at the 2010 Time 100. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Twitter Inventors Gain Patent Protection

Jack Dorsey (current CEO of Square and chairman at Twitter) and Biz Stone (aka Christopher Isaac Stone) have been granted a patent for Twitter, a patent petition that they filed some 6 years ago. The patent is for a device independent messaging system, a pretty accurate description of the social site long before it gained world-wide popularity. The company has the ability to file lawsuits against companies that offer similar services, although non have reached the popularity of Twitter and Twitter is not planning to sue anyone at this time.

Yahoo! headquarters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Copyright remains a hot-button issue in information technology, internet theory, and pop culture, and it will for some time to come.

The overreaching anti-infringement acts SOPA and PIPA were defeated in large part by the collective outcry of private citizens, but the impulses that were driving the legislation remain as strong and far-reaching as ever, and they will give rise to more such efforts.

This isn’t just a conflict between law enforcement and a system that enables theft.  If the associated copyright issues were limited to straightforward theft of intellectual property like films and songs, there would be relatively little controversy. Then the entire subject would indeed be just a question of where to draw the line on enforcement so as to do no harm to the structure and freedom of the internet.