From TechPresident:

University of Massachusetts political science professor Stuart W. Shulman has built software for doing textual analysis on large amounts of data. So when he saw an explosion of Twitter activity around the death of Osama bin Laden, he saw the opportunity to collect a new “first draft of history,” and turned his tools, connected to Twitter via API, to scraping the service.

The result is about a gigabyte total of data containing many, many tweets that had the words “osama” or “bin laden,” and Twitter has demanded that he stop sharing it. Twitter contacted Shulman, who was giving the data away and offering licenses for his software as a textual analysis tool for academics to work with it, and accused him of violating Twitter’s terms of service. Shulman has removed the link to the dataset from his website.

But he’s frustrated, writing on his blog “[i]n my view, this is prime historical data (Twitter-History a.k.a. ‘Twistory’) that yearns to be free.”

Which got the hardworking staff to thinking about another piece of Twistory, Tweets from Tahrir, which publisher OR Books says, “brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the [Egyptian] uprising to be told directly by the people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.”

But there’s no violation there, according to EconomicsNewspaper.com:

[Co-author] Alex Nunns claims to have asked all twitterers (Twitter users) mentioned in the book permission to use their tweets and images. “They all agreed and were enthusiastic.” Twitter has not been contacted but “this should not be a problem, because users have been contacted.”

(There’s a good examination of the intellectual property/terms of service issue in this New Yorker piece.)

As for Prof. Shulman, TechPresident has this consolation for losing the Twitter material:  “[I]f Shulman waits, he should also be able to get that data through the Library of Congress.”