The social media and technology blog Mashable reports that blogger Noah Kravitz has settled the lawsuit filed by his former employer, mobile tech blog PhoneDog, over the Twitter followers Kravitz kept when he left PhoneDog in October 2010 and changed his Twitter account from @phonedog_noah to a more personal @noahkravitz. The original complaint filed in the Northern District of California in July 2011 alleged that Kravitz' keeping the Twitter followers constituted misappropriation of trade secrets, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, and other business torts. According to Mashable, the case has been settled through mediation.
The issue of ownership of a company's online resources, particularly those created and built by former employees on their own initiatives, is not new; in the mid-nineties, the New York Post had a dispute over the NYPost.com domain name with Farhan Memon, a former freelancer who had registered it during his work for the Post, and MTV had a similar conflict with its former VJ Adam Curry over the MTV.com domain Curry had registered. The Kravitz case, though, serves as a reminder that whenever an organization is being represented through an online presence, it needs to create and enforce clear guidelines in advance over who controls that presence, which should include ensuring that a single employee's departure (willing or otherwise) does not impede the organization's online efforts.
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