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."

Jim Edwards has a verified account, and he is the founding editor of Business Insider. His tweets consists mainly of news at BI with occasional commentary outside of BI, and the tweet in question seem to be a comment on the puns used by analyst Teo Lasarte. "Sometimes analysts write funny headlines on their investment notes. When I see one I like, I take a screengrab of the headline and tweet it out. That is what seems to have happened here.", explains Jim Edwards.

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.

BAML's Michael Hartnett nails it in two charts and one funny caption. pic.twitter.com/5waGVuwDk4

— Jim Edwards (@Jim_Edwards) September 3, 2015

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.