[Infowarrior] - Bank of America gets Twitter to delete journalist’s joke, says he violated copyright

[Richard Forno]

Bank of America gets Twitter to delete journalist’s joke, says he violated copyright

by Joe Mullin - Dec 22, 2015 4:15pm EST

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/bank-of-america-gets-twitter-to-delete-journalists-joke-says-he-violated-copyright/

The founding editor of Business Insider UK, Jim Edwards, had a bank delete two of his tweets today. In an e-mail, Bank of America told Edwards that his tweets violated the bank's copyright and that if he kept it up, they'd see to it that his Twitter account was deleted.

"Investment banks apparently have the power to censor journalists on Twitter, simply by asking," Edwards wrote in a short post on Business Insider describing the situation. "That is depressing."

Edwards had quoted a research document produced by analysts. He says the tweets were "probably trivial," but can't really be more specific—in part because the frequent Twitter user can't even remember exactly what they were about.

One of them reads "BAML's Teo Lasarte is developing a pun-based method for analysing auto stocks," where the "BAML" acronym refers to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The tweet included a screenshot that has been deleted.

Edwards acknowledges no earth-shattering information has been lost to the world. In fact, it was likely a compliment to the analyst in question. "Sometimes analysts write funny headlines on their investment notes," he says, leading him to take a screenshot and tweet it out.

B of A might have a case if Edwards had sent out the entire PDF of Lasarte's report, he says, but the funny headline tweet didn't even come close to that. In Edwards' view, it's a no-brainer case of fair use.

The DMCA claim came from the "Attributor Corporation," part of digital-rights company Digimarc, working on behalf of Bank of America. It's the latest example of the Kafka-esque system of copyright takedowns, in which intermediaries like Twitter tend to treat users subject to copyright claims as guilty until proven innocent.

"I have no idea what Twitter agreed to censor for BAML, and no way of guessing what BAML's objection was really about—or if it was even BAML who made the complaint," writes Edwards.

Twitter wouldn't comment on the matter other than to refer to their copyright policy. The Digimarc employee whose name is on the takedown notice didn't respond to Edwards' inquiry.

Other Edwards tweets that quote Bank of America reports remain online, and unchallenged. He has appealed the claim through Twitter's system and says he'll report how that turns out.

"I'm not in favor of journalists getting special treatment over this kind of thing," said Edwards in a Twitter discussion with Ars. "But it is frustrating. Twitter/ BAML are sending me legal spam. I'm replying, basically just asking them to look at this and apply some discretion or judgment. So far, no dice."


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