Twitter deletes Business Insider's Jim Edwards posts due to "copyright infringement"

Twitter deletes Business Insider's Jim Edwards posts due to "copyright infringement"

Business Insider's Jim Edwards writes i "A bank persuaded Twitter to delete my tweets", that Twitter deleted two of his tweets that discussed a Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst's report, after the bank alleged that the tweets infringed its copyright.

"I had an annoying surprise this weekend: an email from a bank telling me that Twitter had deleted two of my tweets for copyright violations. The email also contained a threat: If I continued to violate the bank's rights, my Twitter account would be deleted."


This seems to be a case of an overzelous, and possibly automated, run through Twitter to find possible infringers. A screendump of a headline or a graph isn't quite the dastardly infringement move, as making the entire PDF available would be. Jim compares it to TV shows showing snippets of films in news stories - thus elevating twitter 140 char platform to a news media of sorts. Jim even notes that some of his similar tweets have been left alone, like this one (below). The DMCA claim came from a person called Devon E. E. Weston at something called Attributor Corporation.

Twitter response to Jim was "no comment" just pointing to their copyright policy, despite the fact that he has a verified account (so what good does that do, then?) Jim has appealed: "I have appealed the claim via Twitter's system. It will be interesting to see how effective that is." We've reached out to twitter, but have gotten no response.

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