Are tweets subject to copyright?

Emma Pauw, "social media writer" at We Talk Social (http://www.wetalksocial.co.uk/) asks the question in a piece in B2C (link here).

Actually, the question she asks is "Can You Copyright a Tweet?"

Under the Berne Convention, copyright vests upon creation. So you don't have to "copyright" anything.  It is, or it isn't.  Now, if you want to enforce your copyright, you may have to register your work with a government agency - in the U.S., the Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress. If you want to sue for copyright infringement in U.S. District Court, you need to register it with the Copyright Office.  But the registration doesn't "copyright" the work.  

That's not the interesting part. 

Under U.S. law, copyright "subsists ... in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device."  17 USC 102(a).

A tweet clearly can be an "original work of authorship."  But it doesn't have to be.  Let's assume that it is. (For a serious discussion of this issue, check out this post from WIPO).

A tweet "can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated...with the aid of a machine or device."  

The question is:  is a tweet "fixed in [a] tangible medium of expression?"  I say "yes," because if it's possible to copy a tweet, (and it clearly is), then it's "fixed" enough to qualify.  Put another way, I don't know of anything that can be copied exactly, that's not  considered fixed in a tangible medium of expression.  

And of course, if you want to sue somebody for infringing your copyrighted tweet, you have to send it to the Copyright Office, which means that you have to "fix" it so you can submit it. So that's that.

Should you bother?  Probably not.