Who owns the Twitter followers of an account when they were amassed during an employee’s tenure at a company? A case popped up in the news today on SMH (originally published in the New York Times).
Twitter user sued by ex-employer for his followers (SMH).
The details are fairly clear cut:
- Employee tweets under Twitter handle that bears both his and the company’s name
- Employee amasses 17,000 followers in 4 years
- Employee leaves company and reaches agreement with employer to keep his account as long as he posts occasionally on their behalf
- Employee changes his Twitter account name to his own name and (not sure how) keeps his followers under his new handle
- Former employer then sues (8 months have passed at this time) claiming Twitter list as customer list. They claim that they have invested significant resources to grow the list and consider it their property.
The first Digital Citizens event tonight was a robust discussion on personal versus private online. The title of the evening was Private Parts: Personality and Disclosure – Finding a Balance in the Digital Space. Surprisingly it was the lawyer on the panel, Adrian Dayton (of Social Media for Lawyers) who was sounding like the ad man encouraging people to establish their personal brand and get it all out there on twitter. Sam North of Ogilvy PR, was reminding people of their contractual obligations to their employers and clients with words of warning to not speak badly about them. But, as ever in the social media space the lines quickly become hard to define. As soon as he described Ogilvy’s social media guidelines Damian Damjanovski of BMF spoke of one’s digital footprint, and that if we are active on social media platforms we will become traceable someway or another regardless of privacy settings on the content of accounts. The discussion then turned into what should one disclaim in their profiles: do you disclaim who you work for? Do you express the views as yours and not representative of your employer?
Focal Attractions are the publishers of Mumbrella, an online magazine for media and marketing news. They revealed in the MX rag yesterday that they plan to put a clause, claiming ownership of tweets, in employees contracts. The reason why is because:
an employee’s work-identified posts fell somewhere between their little black book and the firm’s email database … they should belong to the company … so a worker could not take all the followers they had built up using the firm’s identity to a competitor.
Click for a larger image.
Tim Burrowes, co-owner and editor cited this example:
“With Rove, he has got loads of followers and when he leaves Ten they’ll all go with him”
I’m not sure this is the best example that Burrowes could have used. Rove has his own production company and his content is licensed to Ten.
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