What Would Twitter Do? Musician’s Tweets Of Sony E-mails Lead To Threats

Musician Val Broeksmit.
Val
Musician Val Broeksmit spent several days this month publishing screenshots from the hacked Sony e-mails on his Twitter feed. The e-mails he published included deals about new movies, how much the main players were getting paid, and feuds between Sony exec Amy Pascal and Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel.

That got the attention of Sony's legal team, who threatened not only him but Twitter. Yesterday, Vice published a letter from Sony's legal team to Twitter. That has put Broeksmit suddenly at the center of a lot of media attention.

Sony's letter to Twitter doesn't state that a lawsuit is imminent. In fact, the document isn't substantively different from letters that Sony sent out to dozens of media organizations, including Ars, starting about a week ago. The letters, signed by lawyer David Boies, tell media organizations to stop publishing any parts of the Sony e-mails, which it calls "Stolen Information." They also state that Sony hasn't authorized any publications, reserves all its legal rights, and other legal boilerplate.

The Hollywood Reporter has published its letter (PDF), which reads similarly to the others.

Boies' letter is something of a form letter, but Twitter's position in the media ecosystem might make this case unique. It's an intermediary for its millions of users, and the company will have to make tough decisions about what to let those users publish. Reddit also banned its users from sharing snippets of the e-mails last week. So far, Twitter hasn't suspended Broeksmit's account, which the Boies letter explicitly asked them to do.

The Twitter letter does make clear that Sony holds Twitter itself—not only Broeksmit—liable for publishing its secrets.

Twitter hasn't hesitated to suspend accounts in the past when they've violated company policies or the law. For instance, when an Anonymous-owned account misidentified the cop behind the Ferguson shooting and began publishing his personal information, the account was quickly shut down.

The Broeksmit situation raises tough questions about how to manage a world where anyone can grab secrets and start making them public. Broeksmit is making decisions about what to publish and what to withhold, the same kinds of editorial decisions being made in newsrooms around the country. But he's a one-man show—no colleagues to discuss what to do and no legal backup. In a brief interview with Ars last night, Broeksmit frankly admitted he was learning as he went along and struggled with some decisions.

The big question is: will Twitter defend Broeksmit or treat him like a rogue user? And what will it do about the next Broeksmit?

Deciding what's news
Broeksmit has lived in London for the past several years, but this year he's in the US finishing work on a catalog of music he plans to publish. It's a long project, and he started reading the Sony e-mails simply to have something else to do. "I took a break," he explained in an interview with Ars.

"The Pascal-Rudin feud is just entertainment," he said. "It's a fun story, it's interesting. As I got deeper into it, there was a lot of weird reporting with the financials—they said Spider-Man made money, then I'm seeing stuff saying it didn't."

Broeksmit, whose Twitter handle is @BikiniRobotArmy, created screenshots of Sony e-mails and began publishing them on December 13. He ultimately published dozens of e-mails, revealing larger sections of them than many media outlets. He tweeted about the studio's plans for a Pineapple Express sequel, as well as Marvel sequels to the Avengers and Captain America enterprises, stretching out to 2017. He tweeted a portion of the script for Spectre, the new James Bond flick, as well as three pages of Sony executives' planned changes to the script. He published Sony's entire release movie schedule out to 2018.

Twitter suspended his account on December 18 but restored it 24 hours later, he said. On Sunday night, a Sony lawyer e-mailed him directly, telling him to delete the information from his Twitter account and saying his "possession, use and publishing of the Stolen Information implicates numerous federal and California state laws."

Sony also asks him to "arrange for and supervise the destruction of all copies of the Stolen Information in your possession or under your control," and "confirm that such destruction has been completed."

That e-mail scared him, he said. Since then, Broeksmit hasn't tweeted any additional Sony documents, although he has talked to press outlets about Sony's threats against him.

"To me, it's public domain," said Broeksmit. "I don't see it as stolen property. I mean, maybe at one point it was. I don't know what the line is. I figure, other people are doing it—I didn't see the harm in it."

E-mail addresses and phone numbers are redacted from Broeksmit's screenshots. "I purposely didn't make public a lot of intimate stuff," he added. "There's billion dollar deals in there that I didn't publish."