Sony (SNE) is threatening legal action against Twitter (TWTR) in the wake of the hacking attack that revealed sensitive information about the entertainment company.

Sony attorney David Boies has sent a letter to Twitter saying it will be held responsible for users who post what is described as “stolen” material. The letter is similar to one Boise sent to news organizations last week.

Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli says it an effort by Sony to put a lid on the leaks.

“The main argument is this is stolen, private information, and it’s not allowed according to Twitter rules to share someone else’s private information,” he notes. “So Boies obviously wants to have a chilling effect here and say let’s try to discourage people from sharing a lot more of this detail.”

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In particular, Sony wants Twitter to suspend the account of musician Val Broeksmit for tweeting the company’s online correspondence. Broeksmit says Twitter passed along the note and said it could not provide him with legal advice.

Santoli believes this is a murky legal issue.

“There is a kind of a gray area because Twitter doesn’t necessarily prohibit linking out to some other material on the internet that may be interpreted as stolen,” he points out. “He (Broeksmit) was basically taking screen shots of emails in raw form.”

But Santoli believes this is an issue worth debating.

“It’s an interesting question,” he says. “To what degree should Twitter be treated as a publisher who’s responsible for the nature and the ancestry of what goes out on its platform? That might be the ultimate question that this heads toward.”

And Yahoo Finance Editor in Chief Aaron Task thinks how we answer that question is more important for Twitter than what’s happened in this dustup with Sony.

“This strikes me as being potentially a much bigger issue for Twitter and other social media sites,” Task says. “This is the promise and the danger of the internet-- that you can’t control what billions of people are doing all over the world on your platforms.”

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