Read This Tweet Before It's Gone

The point is, whether the motivation is bad jokes or an actual desire to convey important market information, there are tweets with screen grabs from BofA research here and there and everywhere all over Twitter, including some posted just after Edwards' were purged. Just about every other bank's research finds its way to Twitter, too. The general thinking among the press has been that this type of thing is fine under the "fair use" doctrine that allows short snippets of copyrighted material to be reproduced for purposes like news reporting and criticism.  

Twitter has a long policy about copyright infringement that warns about this type of thing. However, it also has a long explanation of what is protected under "fair use" that makes it sound as if Finance Twitter is within its right to do this type of thing: " Uses of factual works are more likely to be protected (than fiction) … Short excerpts are more likely to be protected than copies of entire copyrighted works … Will the copying harm the potential market for the copyrighted work by effectively creating a substitute or replacement for that work? If so, the use is probably not fair use."

So, should anyone want to make a legal challenge out of this, it would present an interesting case. It's hard to argue that Wall Street does not have the right to rein this in.

Let's say, hypothetically, months of research or some proprietary model yields a list of 10 stocks guaranteed to go up, is it "fair use" to tweet out a screen grab of the list? 

A better question, however, is whether it will be in the best interest of Wall Street firms to fight this fight. For one thing, there's the public relations risk. Edwards' piece makes Bank of America look pretty bad: "Investment banks apparently have the power to censor journalists on Twitter, simply by asking," he writes. He draws a comparison to George Orwell's book "1984," which may be a bit over the top, but the bank can't make him delete that!  

More important, the research-tweet purge seems to be clearly part of a larger strategy at hand when dealing with research — to restrict it to paying clients instead of blasting it out and allowing it to roam free.

As Bloomberg's Dakin Campbell reported in September, Bank of America started embedding reports into web pages rather than using PDF files that are easily shared,  joining rivals Morgan Stanley and Citigroup in limiting access. As a result, it won't be surprising if more tweets start disappearing. But by the time most research lands in the inboxes of the press, clients have had plenty of time to act on it, so what's really to be gained by demanding a months-old tweet be purged?

Part of Wall Street's motivation seems to be an attempt to simply figure out how valuable their research is. They might be surprised to find out that some of the real value is in the buzz the reports create in the media.  

1. And sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde.