Copyright battle over sports clips plays out on Twitter

Twitter temporarily shut down a pair of prominent accounts run by sports news websites for posting short clips of NFL and college football highlights. Deadspin’s account and one run by SB Nation were removed after receiving takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that says websites cannot be liable for what their users post but which also requires those websites to remove infringing content when it is flagged. Deadspin’s account was reinstated after being down for about two hours on Oct 12, while the SB Nation account was still down Oct 13.

The sharing of unauthorized sports highlights has been a point of past contention on social media platforms and how it relates to fair use. Deadspin told media organizations it received 18 takedown notices from the NFL about 16 tweets that included GIFs of football highlights. After Twitter stripped the GIFs out of the tweets, the account was reinstated.