Paging Mr. Aristotle! Call Manhattan-411

I have a big old hazardous-to-my-health-four-hour-boner to pick with a certain court official in New York, specifically Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino, Jr. The most-honorable ruled Friday that Brooklyn Bridge Occupier Malcolm Harris cannot fight the subpoena of Twitter for his older tweets. The idea is that conflicting information--which may or may not have existed in the long ago timeline-overridden tweets--would prove whether or not the defendant knew that the occupiers were commanded by police to remain on the footpath, and not to march on the roadway of the bridge. (The NY Times has broader coverage and more information if you're interested in reading between my lines.)

I write an amateur detective-driven mystery series and understand the necessity of evidence-gathering. If I am accused of a crime and a judge issues a warrant to police officers whom she/he believes to have cause to search my effects, then I fully expect them to comb through my computer files for whatever information they might need to prove my guilt. Those on each side of Mr. Harris' harangue have made comparisons to previous rulings related to GPS-gathered public information and third-party bank subpoenas, and those finer litigious points might well need to be argued as they relate to the public-private domain of social networking. But I will leave that to others as this is not the nature of my complaint.

Seems "Here Come De Judge" ruled that Twitter OWNS tweets, and that's where we part ways, kick up the dust, stomp off to spin our spurs, and manifest a nervous tic accompanied by one throbbing eyeball protruding from a skull-full of pulsing blue veins. It's the old boy's club "reach around", if you will, of I will use your own addiction to capitalism to sink you! Mwaahhhhaahhh! (Corporations are people after all and you know how people talk. And the lobbyists all say, "Amen!")

If Twitter owns my tweets, does the:

*phone company own my conversations?
*word processing program own my writing?
*canvas manufacturer own my art?
*Pyrex company own my casserole?
*gas station own my car?
*lumber yard own my home?

The equivalencies I'm making are that Twitter is a platform through which we publish information. Likewise, the half-dozen nuggets above are examples of platforms or methods by which something comes into being. They serve their purpose and the relationship ends. (Much like an umbilical cord or The Starland Vocal Band.) Amazon is my publishing platform but they are not my publisher. I am my publisher. Amazon helps me bring my wares to market, as it were. (Successfully too, as I am now on the best seller list! See how I worked that in.) As such, Amazon does not own my books. Twitter's user agreement mentions the service's ability to publish and distribute content, royalty-free. They do not own the tweets, they just "market" them for me.

The precipice we're dancing on here is what constitutes speech and whether or not corporations are really people. If we've truly chosen to police ourselves by corporation, then we've also allowed our souls to be bartered with and our civil rights privatized.

At the risk of bombarding you with non-sequiturs or going all sophist on your ass, here are the logical false conclusions I came to, courtesy of the good Manhattan judge and the October Nine:

Twitter is a corporation,

Corporations are people,

Therefore Twitter is a person.

Money is speech,

Tweets are speech,

Therefore tweets are money.

This person, Twitter, owns my tweets,

So I've given Him 3,720 of something valuable,

What rate of interest should I charge for the loan?

I say screw Citizens United, we need to become Citizens Untied--or realize we already are. Oh, and not that I'm keeping score, but when I link this blog post to my followers in a second, that'll be 3,721 whosits you own me, Twitter. And if you OWN my MONEY (tweets), then why the hell aren't you paying the bills for me? Good Judge Matthew and the Supremes would want to know!