
Lawsuit May Determine Who Owns a Twitter Account - barredo
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/technology/lawsuit-may-determine-who-owns-a-twitter-account.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto
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adriand
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.

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defrost
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.

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extension
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.

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wycats
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.

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Create
_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

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joeyh
Spoiler: Twitter owns it.

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Permit
$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.

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radagaisus
What's the handle?

~~~
Permit
twitter.com/#!/ThisIsJoshVarty

