News - Twitter followers are a client list, man sued by Phonedog

[HEXUS]

Noah Kravitz, sued for £235,000 for keeping twitter followers after leaving firm.

Read more.

[kingpotnoodle]

If the account was setup and run on company equipment and in the course of performing his duties then it's not his personal account and PhoneDog are right to sue. If the account predated his employment then it's a muddy business.

[Smudger]

I think the account was named @bloke'sname - phonedog, which implies a company account, although he did change the name after he left...

[Dareos]

Whats Twitters stance on all this? isn't there a EULA or some agreement to sign up to when using it for business etc? Surely Twitter can claim the client list as their own.

They probably wont even get involved tbh, but would be nice to know.

[BobF64]

Tbh, those following someone on twitter fall into 2 groups, those following the persons tweets and those following PR tweets written in a particular way.

If most of it was the first group, surely they would just drop on feed and switch to the new one, once they learnt.

If they were the latter group, then its definitely a client list, and they would have kept reading the tweets made by a new guy.

[iamlorro]

Tbh, those following someone on twitter fall into 2 groups, those following the persons tweets and those following PR tweets written in a particular way.

If most of it was the first group, surely they would just drop on feed and switch to the new one, once they learnt.

If they were the latter group, then its definitely a client list, and they would have kept reading the tweets made by a new guy.

...so the cynic in me says that the company are partly doing it for publicity, to get people to follow a new account - but it paints them in a bad light, so not sure that it was a good idea.

[GingerNinjaRay]

Yeah I thought that when I first read it too, if he'd taken the PhoneDog part out of his name surely people would realise it was then just a personal account and if they were really bothered about PhoneDog they wouldn't follow him anymore they'd follow whoever was replacing him, if anyone. Seems pretty unfair to me but apparently people are saying PhoneDog have a good chance of winning this.