This has to be some kind of brilliant hoax: a Twitter ‘attribution troll’ is showering threats on anyone who tweets a popular one-line poem.
On Press Inc., supposedly a division of Knopf Publishing (according to its Twitter profiles), was running a search of its own and issuing tweet after threatening tweet to anyone who dared publish a short (really short — under 140 characters) poem by reclusive poet, Shaun Shane, without attribution. The entire poem reads as follows: “If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak.”
The threats–which have apparently escalated to imaginary police investigations over Amazon reviews, too–are baseless, writes TechDirt’s Tim Cushing. Even if a tweet-length poem meets the expressive requirements for copyright protection, experts say it’s unlikely to generate a credible lawsuit.
I tried it and it worked like a charm:
