[Air-L] Twitter Data Sharing Update - Thou Shalt Not Share Collections of Tweets

[stu at texifter.com]

   The "perp" in this case would gladly buy a large informal after-hours
   roundtable the first two rounds of microbrew to discuss the matter in
   depth at #ir12

   I think I understand what Twitter is doing and their perfectly
   reasonable follow up email will be on the blog soon ;-)

   ~Stu

   -------- Original Message --------
   Subject: Re: [Air-L] Twitter Data Sharing Update - Thou Shalt Not Share
   Collections of Tweets
   From: Alex Halavais <[1]alex at halavais.net>
   Date: Thu, May 05, 2011 2:39 pm
   To: [2]air-l at listserv.aoir.org
   This seems like an opportune time to ask whether there is ever a time
   when violating the Terms of Service is an ethical practice for
   researchers. (As a practical issue, clearly Twitter can block access
   to particular IP blocks that it finds violating its API ToS, or turn
   off the firehose if you are whitelisted.)
   The natural response to this for most people is that it is never
   ethically permissible to do so. While I recognize that (for example)
   this would expose you to personal sanctions from the company for
   violating those terms, and potentially expose your institution, I'm
   less concerned with the legal implications than I am with ethical
   restrictions this places on the researcher.
   I think there are cases where violation of a set of Terms is ethically
   permissible, a position I took up at an AoIR preconference workshop
   last year. This gives us a concrete example. It seems to me that the
   tweets themselves are not owned by Twitter, and so they are
   restricting your ability to access these materials programmatically,
   not to actually having or redistributing the content. If you
   "magically" were in possession of a collection of tweets, they would
   have little say in their redistribution (though the authors might, an
   issue that I think is separate).
   Specifically, Twitter prohibits "scraping" the service, but fails to
   define this. If I hire a war room to cut and paste tweets, does this
   violate the policy? It's simply not clear. It seems to me there is a
   kind of Turing-test for scrapers: Twitter would have no way to know
   (other than asking) whether I was scraping programmatically or had
   hired a room full of undergrads to cut and paste.
   I've gotten away from my original question. There's no question that
   the courts have thus far sided with ToS as generally being binding.
   But when is it (or is it ever) ethically either acceptable or
   necessary to violate a web site's Terms?
   Best,
   Alex
   --
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References

   1. mailto:alex at halavais.net
   2. mailto:air-l at listserv.aoir.org
   3. http://alex.halavais.net/
   4. mailto:Air-L at listserv.aoir.org
   5. http://aoir.org/
   6. http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
   7. http://www.aoir.org/