Films that have been posted have reportedly included Avatar, Hackers, Need For Speed and the first one to be posted, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
As noted by Forbes, Twitter has usually relied on an automated copyright strike system that would remove the media in question, with a computer system swiftly removing anything that might violate copyright laws.
Forbes also noted that some World Cup games may have been shown on Twitter.
Credit: Universal Pictures
The threads these are posted on, some of which include up to 50 tweets with clips of the film, have remained up for hours, if not days. The media itself was never removed and users didn’t see the usual “this media cannot be displayed” message.
Instead, Twitter has had to suspend the accounts that have posted such threads. It would seem that the accounts were suspended manually by a real person behind a computer, rather than the automated system after the tweet threads with the films went viral.
There was also a 10-minute clip from SpongeBob SquarePants which was still up yesterday, but has since been removed.
Twitter might be hit with various DMCA claims as well as more serious legal troubles if they don’t fix their copyright system to detect these violations sooner.
Elon Musk
Current owner Elon Musk has previously teased plans to allow Twitter Blue users to post clips up to 40-minutes in length. However, if Twitter can’t get a grip on these copyright issues, such plans might bring more trouble than they’re worth.
Just yesterday (November 22), Musk announced a delay to the launch of Twitter Blue, a subscription service that gives you that precious blue tick, until the company had “high confidence of stopping impersonation”.
