There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.

So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.

It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.

> It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn

It's a much grayer area, considering NYTimes owns their content and x does not own the content they serve. I think this question deserves zealous representation.

NY Times would get you for copyright infringement, but X has no copyright in the content on X.

Given caching, blocking, userscripts, etc., most client things are have things built in that are effectively smart proxies or glorified layer 7 application gateways.

You can write your own client for arbitrary services. You can run your own client on your own hardware, and you can host your client on someone else's hardware. Your client can render the content however it likes. You can have someone else do the work to render it like you like it and run that, locally or remotely.

There are a lot of ways to get to an "apparatus" that's analogous to both nitter and to a proxy for nytimes that ensure consuming public comments by other users doesn't suck.

As far as I know, there's no law requiring billboards to be seen by all drivers using the public road it sits beside, nor requiring all web clients to render ads. As far as I know, in most of the world there's no law saying users can't buy DNS or proxy or application firewall or ad blocking services from a third party -- services that can run between you and host, on your router, on your device at various OS levels, or as extensions to your browser.

On the contrary, there seem to be increasing numbers of laws requiring servers to deliver their content to arbitrary clients even when a firm makes its own servers, content, and preferred client devices and wishes to "protect the user's experience" or whatever the firm's justification might be.

Given a decade or two of marketing the "public square", other people's public posts, intended for public consumption, and expected to reach the public, picking that content as worthy of banning "useragents" should be shaky ground. Should be an interesting battleground for digital rights.

It's enough to wonder if a reason to go after the nitters is to establish misfortunate legal precedent using a target that can't defend itself?

They just need to rename to nitter.ai, and it would be "legal".

Twitter doesn't own content generated by users, the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.

The legal future is whatever people fight for being legal. You see entities that are hostile to humanity making the laws they want all the time, why be so defeatist?

Of course it can run legally. What might not be possible is to open a running instance to the general public, certainly not to paying public but an argument could be made that even allowing free access would violate some law or other. This is not a certainty though and the continued existence of products like Opera Mini speak against there being such legal prohibitions to allowing public access to content-changing proxies.

Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.