1. “Typically, a work must meet minimal standards of originality in order to qualify for copyright”
– I am not sure anything 140 characters long could qualify under that standard.

2. “Copyright law recognizes the right of an author based on whether the work actually is an original creation, rather than based on whether it is unique; two authors may own copyright on two substantially identical works, if it is determined that the duplication was coincidental, and neither was copied from the other.”
– This grants a lot of leeway, particularly with regard to text strings in the realm of 140 characters.

However, the thought experiment did jog a series of questions, the answers to which I do not know: When a copyright is granted, what is actually being copyrighted?

The law states that the idea contained in a work is not copyrighted. Rather, it is the particular expression of an idea that is copyrighted. What I am uncertain about is whether the expression in question is copyrighted only in the language in which it was written, or any possible translation as well. Also, are there distinctions between computer and spoken languages?

Since any particular work can be expressed as a binary numeral, but numbers themselves cannot be copyrighted, at what point does a number (one which can be decoded by a particular software program into a copyrighted work) transform into something that is copyrighted? Is it a violation of copyright to share the number, as distinct from the work?

Here is an interesting thought experiment. Text strings are really just numbers (translate every character into its ASCII character code, and the concatenation is a binary numeral representing some positive integer). Some of those integers are copyrightable (the one representing the text of Gladwell’s “Outliers,” for example). Some aren’t (I don’t think I can claim copyright in the number 1, for example). So what is the smallest copyrightable number?

I know what Lessig would say, but I am curious to hear your thoughts on the matter spelled out in a bit more detail beyond what I think your liberal tendencies might imply (granted, I haven’t finished reading the book yet)!

I would also like to point out that your assessment of Twitter as a service that allows people “to broadcast short text messages about what they are doing,” is a bit simplistic, and reminiscent of what the slower digital immigrants used to say about blogs and blogging. Twitter is a platform: how people use it is limited mostly by imagination.