One of two things:

1) No one complains, Disney uses the content and life goes on.

2) Someone complains, Disney takes that tweet down and replaces it with a different tweet and life goes on.

Disney is not going to court over a tweet. They'll just take it down if someone complains.

Also, under copyright law Disney will not "own" any of the IP in these tweets, the question is whether they have a license to use it.

In general, is a tweet long enough to be a work for copyright purposes? Anyone know of any copyright caselaw around tweets?

I can imagine some poems being complete works and fitting in the character limit, perhaps.

Stanford has a good webpage about short works and copyrights[0]. I’m sure 512 byte demo scene programs are copyrighted, and with Twitter raising the character limit, I’m sure some could be copyrighted.

[0]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/09/09/copyright_protection...

Thanks, a useful review of US copyright here.

>A similar style of nonsense “code words” prompted Judge Learned Hand to write, “Conceivably there may arise a poet [...] //

A US judge really is called "Billings Learned Hand", surely a case of nominative determinism.