Did Disney Try to Claim Ownership of an Entire Hashtag?
You sign up for some whacky s**t when you join social media. Those sites basically make you agree to give them all your data, a couple of fingers, and they can pretty much use anything you upload to them however they want. Yeah, Twitter probably owns all those dick pics you were DMing those Twitch thots.
But what happens when a third-party wants to lay claim to the content you create on social media? This is a question we were grappling with today. It started when Disney made a seemingly innocuous tweet about May 4th, known as “May the Fourth” to Star Wars fans and Cinco de Cuatro to very disappointed Arrested Development fans tuning into the Netflix revival of the once-great series.
Celebrate the Saga! Reply with your favorite #StarWars memory and you may see it somewhere special on #MayThe4th.
— Disney+ (@DisneyPlus) April 27, 2020
So Disney is planning some sort of publicity thing using tweets for May the Fourth, the unofficial Star Wars day, using your stories about why you love Star Wars.
The problem is Disney has a legal department and that legal department is full of dumb assholes, because they followed that tweet up with this one:
By sharing your message with us using #MayThe4th, you agree to our use of the message and your account name in all media and our terms of use here: https://t.co/G0AyToufQ5
— Disney+ (@DisneyPlus) April 27, 2020
Yeah. Disney needs you to agree to their terms of use before tweeting a hashtag, because of course they do. Does anyone see the flaw in this logic here? Disney wants you to not sue them for using your tweet in a commercial on Disney+ or whatever, but how does this actually indemnify them? Twitter is basically a public forum.
The above legal language applies ONLY to replies to this tweet using #MayThe4th and mentioning @DisneyPlus. These replies may appear in something special on May the 4th!
— Disney+ (@DisneyPlus) April 27, 2020
Disney later clarified they were only talking about replies to their original tweet and they weren’t trying to claim some blanket ownership of all tweets using the #MayThe4th hashtag, but they had already awakened the beast.
Fun fact: Disney once tried to buy Twitter but didn’t because Twitter users are too metal and awesome. And Twitter’s eye of Sauron turned on Disney this day.
#MayThe4th remind everyone that Disney has effectively destroyed how copyright law should work so they can milk franchises for possibly hundreds of years while creating a scenario where small content creators have their livelihoods threatened for snippets of songs and movies https://t.co/Sk75lAjt0s
— Walt (@_watsu) April 27, 2020
Disney's back on their bullshit #MayThe4th pic.twitter.com/eotMMDloPB
— Parthenogenesis Exvangelical (@katamarididomi) April 27, 2020
That’s just a taste of what they got.
It turns out a lot of people get pissed off if you go to the website they waste their life on and seemingly try to lay claim to their content.
