The companies filed an amicus brief in the legal case between financial website theflyonthewall.com and Barclays Plc, claiming that Internet chatter cannot be contained and that restricting the spread of news content could hurt the public.
A U.S. federal judge ruled in March 2010 that a news site called "theflyonthewall.com" had misappropriated content from major analyst firms by publishing highlights of new equity research by Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, and Merrill Lynch.
The judge agreed that they had invested time and resources into researching the market, and that flyonthewall.com was making money off of their hard effort by offering subscriptions so that users could access The Fly's near-realtime writeups of the analysts' work.
An injunction was issued, but then flyonthewall.com asked whether it was permissible to publish information that already had appeared elsewhere, as for example news reports by Dow Jones, Reuters, Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal.
Google and Twitter have filed briefs supporting flyonthewall.com's right to publish once the information already has been made available elsewhere on the Internet.
Google and Twitter pointed out that it's nearly impossible to implement some period of exclusivity for news when it can spread so quickly across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, and that upholding such a restriction could actually hurt the news-consuming public.
It's just another example of the decisive rule regulations and laws can have in creating or destroying a business model.
