Lawsuit May Determine Who Owns a Twitter Account

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/technology/lawsuit-may-determine-who-owns-a-twitter-account.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

by barredo • 15 years ago

41 13 15 years ago

nytimes.com

defrost• 15 years ago

There's still a great many legal issues to resolve in regards to online accounts and assets.

You can spend many thousands of dollars accumulating legally purchased iTunes media for your devices but can you will that collection to a friend or a child if you die?

There's no such issue with a vinyl collection or other physically tangible assets.

adriand• 15 years ago

It's interesting because the best company-related Twitter accounts are the ones that are transparently owned by people who voice their own opinions. The ones that are wholly corporate, where you don't know the name of the person (or people) you are dealing with, are the ones least likely to be worth following, and frequently the least likely to have a substantial following.

I don't think companies can have it both ways: a person who posts in their own voice, at work but also in their own time, that builds up a substantial following, but that must also be a creature of the corporation. Either let people be themselves and take their social media accounts with them, or be a faceless corporation that owns everything, even the voices and opinions of its employees.

extension• 15 years ago

I don't see why every new thing that comes along has to have its own set of laws. We already have ways of deciding who owns things. In this case, it sounds like there was an agreement in place about who owned the Twitter account and the company is trying to break that agreement. I don't see any novel principle for which a precedent should be set.

wycats• 15 years ago

That's exactly what's happening here. No new laws are being proposed; a lawsuit will be adjudicated on the basis of exactly the existing precedent you are referencing.

nvk• 15 years ago

I agree, it's beyond me why they don't apply the laws that govern everything else. There is nothing new here, it's the same as if a sales person too the rolodex on the way out.

Permit2• 15 years ago

$2.50 per follower, per month? Does anyone know how they came to this estimate? I imagine any motivated HN reader could game Twitter in an attempt to generate a comparable number of followers.

I took up a similar challenge for myself in an attempt to prank a few of my friends and ended up with over 13,000 followers. It'd be relatively trivial to scale it up to a few dozen accounts as well.

andrewpi• 15 years ago

They needed a number greater than $75,000 to meet jurisdictional requirements in federal court. I'm guessing that was a primary factor in calculating a damages number.

radagaisus• 15 years ago

What's the handle?

Permit2• 15 years ago

twitter.com/#!/ThisIsJoshVarty

sk5t• 15 years ago

Looks like they are also trying to wash away their other obligations to a partner, founder, or key employee.

llz• 15 years ago

Could you let on what you did to get a large following? It's been really hard for me personally. Thanks!

joeyh• 15 years ago

Spoiler: Twitter owns it.

Create• 15 years ago

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. -- humdog

Lawsuit May Determine Who Owns a Twitter Account

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