NY Times Asks Twitter To Shut Down Retweeting Feed

WesternActor writes "According to PCMag.com, the New York Times has asked Twitter to shut down the FreeNYT Twitter feed that basically retweets all of the Times' articles. Is this really possible? After all, the feed just points to a list of Times Twitter accounts, all of which can also be found on the Times' website. If the Times succeeds in shutting this down, it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general."

Re:They wont succeed.

[appleguru]

I should have looked it up before I rattled off a first post without being logged in, but it would indeed violate the standard TOS (unless NYT agreed to a custom version, which I doubt):

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

http://twitter.com/tos [twitter.com]

Re:They wont succeed.

[appleguru]

Did you even *read* TFS? That's the problem exactly. The NYT *is* the ones originally posting the content (yes, largely headlines), on Twitter. And now they are asking for the retweeting of their tweets to be blocked. Absurd.

Factually Incorrect Title: There Is No Retweeting

[thehossman]

The twitter account in question isn't retweeting the URLs.

There is no automated bot in play here.

All this guy did was create a "Twitter List" of the ~40 official Twitter Accounts used by the NYTimes (they seem to have one per section of their site) ...

https://twitter.com/#!/FreeNYT/firehose/members [twitter.com]

...if you follow that "list" you get access to all of those URLs.

You would get access to the same URLs if you followed each of those ~40 individual twitter accounts directly.

Essentially the NYT is complaining that someone is promoting the existence of their twitter accounts.