Company sues ex-employee for his Twitter account and followers
The lawsuit could determine who owns a Twitter account: a company or the employee who started it.
That question is being argued in a California court, where the mobile phone website PhoneDog.com has filed a lawsuit against its former employee Noah Kravitz after he left the company and took his 17,000 Twitter follows with him.
PhoneDog is suing Kravitz for $340,000—or $2.50 per follower.
As a writer for PhoneDog, Kravitz launched a Twitter account under the handle @Phonedog_Noah. When he left PhoneDog, the company said he could keep his Twitter account in exchange for occasional posts, according to Kravitz.
He told The New York Times that PhoneDog asked him to “tweet on their behalf from time to time and I said sure, as we were parting on good terms.” PhoneDog brought the lawsuit eight months later, claiming his followers are part of a customer list.
The company gave this statement to the Times:
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