Google and Twitter have weighed in on the “hot news” doctrine, which grants newspapers in some states a time-limited, quasi-property right over facts they report, arguing that the legal concept is old ‘n’ busted in the instantaneous Internet age. 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. FREE-RIDING FLY A US federal judge ruled back in March that The Fly had misappropriated content from major analyst firms—Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, and Merrill Lynch—to get a “free ride” on their stock recommendations. The firms (and the judge) believed that they had invested time and resources into researching the market, and The Fly 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. Read the rest of this article… Read the comments on this post