Plagiarism

When @haikutwaiku first appeared on Twitter I followed them. Then I saw what they were doing with stealing people's tweets and making it appear that they come from them. Stealing MY tweets.

I sent @messages to them asking to stop. No response. I sent messages to Twitter support staff asking questions about it. I unfollowed them. That did not help. I asked more questions. I was told to block them. I think they were the first account I actually really blocked.

I thought that worked, but it didn't - instead of scraping from my account, they scraped from twemes. I tried to block them on twemes, but it only blocks them from results in my searches, not for anyone else.

I asked repeatedly for the @haikutwaiku spambot to be one of the many accounts Twitter blocks and deletes. I find it incredibly ironic and shameful that Twitter deletes as spam accounts of good decent folk, and then refuses to block an account like this, when so many of the haiku authors have begged for it.

Does Twitter realize that according to copyright law, if we authors allow the scraping to continue without objecting to it, that places our poems, our haiku, our creative content in the public domain without recourse to copyright law or protection? If we want to do that and choose to do that, that would be one thing, but to have loss of authorship rights and intellectual property rights FORCED on us because of Twitter's inability to respond to complaints about the account is likely to eventually result in a two-pronged suit -- 1) against the thief, and 2) against Twitter for facilitating and supporting the theft. Right now Twitter is just lucky that the people who have been victimized by this either don't have the money for a suit or are CC types who are willing to share (even if they didn't intend to share quite so extensively as is happening).

Twitter doesn't seem to be doing much about scrapers in general. I have trouble sometimes tracking a tweet back to its original author.
Folks, pay attention. You've had a lot of complaints about this account (@haikutwaiku). A lot of the "contributing authors" have blocked the account. You say you are working on the broader issue of spam accounts. You kill off other accounts (including ones I actually DO want to read!). Then you need to deal with this, the right way, in a timely fashion. Please. We poets and haiku writers tend to be basically nice folks, generally speaking. Someone else who gets scraped might not be so patient, and when that happens you will have left yourself wide open for a lawsuit by contributing to the problem when it is reported.