Twitter is the only place where people think that the bloggers at the trashy on-line tabloid Above the Law are (a) reliable, and (b) authorities. When I tell this to my legal practitioner and legal academic friends, most can't believe it's true!
UPDATE: Since most of my readers do not use Twitter, I realize the latter was a bit opaque--sorry! Briefly, one of the dopey bloggers at Above the Law was mocking me last week for allegedly thinking I could copyright my tweets so no one can retweet them, and then other people retweeted his mockery. This would have been silly, but it had nothing to do with the issue I was raising. What was omitted is that my Twitter account is protected (i.e., only approved followers can see my tweets--much better, I must say!); when your account is protected, not even your followers can retweet anything you post to your account. Yet someone then among my followers was taking screen shots of my tweets, and then reposting them elsewhere and sending them to non-followers--which defeats the point of protecting the tweets, of course. The Twitter terms of service do not directly address the status of protected tweets, but one extreme possible solution, suggested by my lawyer (who is an actual lawyer specializing in intellectual property and defamation for 25 years, not a failed lawyer like the ones at Above the Law), was to register the copyright for the protected tweets. Not worth the trouble, obviously, and in any case the problem has been solved by other means since. What's amazing is that even nominally adult tenured faculty--like Jacob Levy (McGill) and Kate Manne (Cornell)--retweeted the Above the Law nonsense (Manne makes a particular fool of herself with her commentary). I'm not sure what explains their gullibility: malice? stupidity? both? Oh well.
ANOTHER: One might have hoped Prof. Manne would have learned something about the risk of relying on out-of-context snippets from a protected Twitter account, but it appears not yet. In any case, I hope she can get over her obsessive Twitter vendetta against me (of which the above was but one example over the last few weeks) and move on to more productive activities.
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