Man Sued for Retaining Former Employer’s Twitter Follower List

With the advent of social services like Facebook and Twitter, the idea of what’s “owned” by either the service or the person has been often debated. When your former employer is behind the questioning, however, things can get really murky, really fast. Case in point: the experience of Noah Kravitz, former employee of Phonedog, a website focusing on mobile technology.

During his tenure with Phonedog, Noah amassed about 17,000 followers while representing the company. After he left the company, he changed his Twitter name to get rid of the Phonedog moniker (something I didn’t even realize was possible), and retained those followers. Phonedog isn’t too happy about this, as it believes its resources went into attracting all these followers, and as such, the list belongs to it.

As Noah refused to give back the Twitter account, Phonedog has decided to sue him for $2.50 per user, for a total of $370,000. At the same time, Noah insinuates that Phonedog gave him permission to retain the list, as long as he talked about the company from time to time through his tweets.

As someone who runs a tech website similar to Phonedog, I can understand where the company is on this one, and am kind of on their side. If I had an employee working for me amassing boatloads of followers while on the clock, I’d want to retain that list after the employee has left, replacing his likeness with someone else that comes on board. It’s just simple business, and much like a mailing list, you’re not going to let someone up and walk out with it.

That said, if Phonedog didn’t have it as a written signed rule somewhere that the list would have to be handed over after termination of employment, then it’s a little hard to see a winning case here. And at that, $2.50 per user is a bit extreme, especially when you consider that the vast majority of Twitter followers don’t ardently read what you have to say given they follow so many people / companies.

What are your thoughts on this?