We have to go back to the last deluge of snow in February 2009, I had just recently come out of hospital with an all new metal knee joint (to match the other knee implant eight months earlier; as a result I was confined to the house and ramped up my time on Twitter virtually day and night as it was impossible to sleep, the pain still resisting 8 daily Diclofenacs!

Phillip Schofield, the TV Presenter on ITV’s This Morning was busy tweeting that due to snow he might not get into the studio from his vast estate on the top of a hill. At the time, accurate immediate local snow reports were hard to come by, the Met Office would ramble on, and on, issue warnings for whole sections of the country and at times compete with the Environment Agency but still failed to give you precise, immediate, very local snow reports.

As the objective was to get Scofield to his ITV studio in Central London, plotting a possible route, I suggested to my happy band of followers, we all immediately report and retweet snow conditions using a kind of pre-determined shorthand namely a twitter hashtag #UKsnow followed by a FULL postcode and the depth of snow in inches, plus any other info in the remaining tweet.

Armed with this information, inputting the whole postcode into websites like “Up My Street”, would give you the locality and so on. Crude but effective. It launched properly about 11am and then began to climb even knocking the USA Super Bowl off the twitter leaders board, this woke up America and suddenly my humble hashtag was climbing even higher. “Whats with the snow thing in England?” They would wail…

This caught the eye of a few lurking UK software developers and various mashups began to appear @OlliBray (no relation) had one but used balloons and these overlapped. @BenMarsh started a snow map, but then mass tweeted his developer crowd and (I like to think unwittingly) changed and lost the whole travel information aspect by converting part of the data into a simple snow map. Ideal for software experts and assorted computer nerds but of little use if you wanted detailed travel information.

You have to understand, the first Ben Marsh UKsnow map didn’t give details of the tweets, so in effect hijacked my information hashtag for his own program and OMITTED the travel information requirement

Given a few prods at the time by the media and by a few fellow developers, Ben then acknowledged where he got the hashtag from and has indeed made a lot of money out it (and good luck to him) with other programs based on the #UKsnow program, he did one for Vodafone to market Holiday destinations and roaming charges for example.

As a lot of my then and current followers helped to get the hashtag off the ground, long before Ben opened his map website, creative copyright is I respectfully still mine as originator of the made up word UKsnow. We also suggested the BBC use UK SNOW for detailed snow reports, which they now do.

Don’t get me wrong, the NEW UKsnow map from @Benmarsh does the job very well, as he now incorporates the twitter feed but it would take very little to acknowledge that he didn’t start it all off and that a lot of other people got the ball rolling bewfore he came along… including @schofe so Ben in the style of Desert Island Discs UKsnow hashtag originated by Julian Bray and developed by Ben Marsh. That would satisfy the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in the UK and I’d be more than happy to grant a licence for UKsnow and SnowUK…. both of which will trigger the Ben Marsh map but hopefully the newer SnowUk will contain emergency news and practical help for those stranded by putting in the precise position, a hunderd calls to the appropriate emergency service will ensure help really is on the way..

So I’m not saying stop or cease just acknowledge that others were involved, The Daily Telegraph wrote up the whole story so its already in the public domain and for the rest of you flaming away just don’t believe your own hype… justb relax and enjoy life…Cheers JB

Unless you explicitly protect your stream, you’re participating in a broadcast medium; you put your comments and thoughts into the public domain. As Twitter themselves say “Our Services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public. This includes not only the messages you Tweet and the metadata provided with Tweets, such as when you Tweeted, but also the lists you create, the people you follow, the Tweets you mark as favorites or Retweet and many other bits of information.” (http://twitter.com/privacy)

Actually it goes further than that “By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).” (http://twitter.com/tos)

Thus, if you put something onto Twitter for which you wish to claim intellectual property rights on then either a) you should be able to show prior art claiming this, perhaps on a blog which you control and assert copyright over or b) Twitter isn’t the medium to do this in the first place.

By all means bask in the reflected glory of your followers, retweets and mentions and say “look … I first thought of that, aren’t I clever?” … that’s what we all do on here to a greater or a lesser degree.

But to throw comments into the public domain, see them become successful and then shout “stop! that’s not right, do what I want and how I tell you” shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how Twitter, broadcast media and social media works in the first place.

Overall, I’m left feeling that “Mr B” could have rightly come out of this as someone who was verging on visionary with the origin of the #uksnow hashtag but instead comes across completely the reverse. The whole situation saddens me.

If I came up with a brilliant idea but then broadcast it over a communication medium which is intrinsically open (and not even restricted to users of the service – since anyone on the whole internet can potentially see a tweet in search results).. well.. I’d expect to have forfeited any rights to claim ownership.

Incidentally, that’s a great example of why the term “intellectual property” can be so misleading. Mr B “invented” the #uksnow hashtag, so there *must* be “intellectual property” in it that belongs to him. Right?

But intellectual property is just an umbrella term for a disparate collection of differing rights and monopolies. “#uksnow” can’t be patented, hasn’t been registered as a trade mark (even if it could be), is too insignificant/unoriginal to qualify for copyright protection, has no commercial trading history to support a passing off claim, and above all fails to meet the qualifications for protection as a plant variety.

You get the point. Whenever someone starts asserting that they own “the IP”, the first question should be: “/What/ IP? What type?” I’ve come across heated arguments between parties to a contract over who will own “the IP” when in fact, on looking closely, there was no “IP” there worth fighting over. People had just latched on to “IP” as a general concept, as it appears Mr B may have done.

You are the first #tagsquatter! Congratulations. Oh, I now *own* #tagsquatter, btw. I’ll be round for my royalties if I see it again

A few comments so far have been a bit abusive, and I won’t put them up. Keep ‘em civil, people. Or funny. Funny and acerbic.

My view is that, you cannot take ownership of a hashtag, you cannot tell people not to use it.

If people decide to form a structure (that happened in essence organically) then let hem, if someone decides that they can use that structure to create something then so be it.