How do Wall Street’s lawyers and lobbyists find the time?

Somehow, while fending off the complaints of munis burnt by derivatives, contending with proposals to overhaul the US financial system and worrying about the SEC poking around, they’ve managed to wage war on theflyonthewall.com.

The battle between the Street — including Merrill “stop napsterizing our research” Lynch, BarCap, Morgan Stanley, and boutique firm Sidoti — and the hyperactive website is a long-running one, stretching back to at least 2007.

In the most recent series of developments, BarCap, Merrill, Morgan and Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc filed suit against the site in March. In their complaint, the banks accused theflyonthewall.com of engaging in the “rapid and widespread dissemination of financial services firms’ equity research recommendations through unauthorized channels of electronic distribution.”

There have been a series of twists and turns since then – the banks suffered an initial setback when an appeals court in New York overturned the order of another court that the website cease its rapid-fire reporting of analyst calls.

And in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on Monday, no less than Google and Twitter teamed up in support of the site, saying, in reference to the so-called hot news doctrine invoked by the banks in their complaint:

In a world of modern communications technology, where anyone with a cell phone may disseminate news throughout the world even as it is occurring, the notion that a single media outlet should have a monopoly on time-sensitive facts is not only contrary to law, it is, as a practical matter, futile

Google and Twitter are, of course, talking their book. But it is a case that bloggers (including this one), wire services and other aggregators and providers of information and data are watching closely.

Related links:
Waiter, There’s a Fly in my Distribution Platfom – Integrity Research
Theflyonthewall Case Pits Free Riding Versus Free Speech – Integrity Research
The Hot News on the Hot News Doctrine – Frost Brown Todd
The A.P., Hot News and Hotheaded Blogs – NY Times Bits Blog

This entry was posted by Stacy-Marie Ishmael on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 22:06 and is filed under Capital markets. Tagged with copyright, merrill lynch, morgan stanley, research, sidoti, theflyonthewall.com. Edit this entry.