The Rules of the Biz

This morning, many Twitter users received the e-mail from the company's co-founder Biz Stone informing them that the Terms of Service of the popular microblogging site had changed.

It's a dramatic transition, because the new terms of service consists of 2,883 words by my count, not counting supporting documents, while the old terms of service was one of the most streamlined by the standard of other social computing sites with a mere 743 words. (Twitter credited Flickr as the source of much of their legal verbiage at that time.) The company blog posting that covers the changes doesn't say much about the hefty additions to the copyright policy, even though not much infringement seems possible with 140 text characters.