January 4, 2012

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posted by Harvard Law Review

 

Responding to Jamal Greene, The Anticanon, 125 Harv. L. Rev. 379 (2011).

Is Dred Scott Really the Worst Opinion of All Time? Why Prigg Is Worse Than Dred Scott (But Is Likely to Stay Out of the “Anticanon”)

Sanford Levinson :: In The Anticanon, Professor Jamal Greene examines how a particular set of cases came to constitute the “anticanon” of constitutional law, that is, cases whose names can be spoken only to be condemned.  In this response, Professor Sanford Levinson questions whether the vitriol visited upon anticanonical cases, whether by lawyers or the laity, is necessarily defensible.  Levinson suggests that anticanonical cases may be indistinguishable from cases accorded far greater respect (and, indeed, treated as “canonical” exemplars of legal craft).  Some anticanonical cases may have genuine merit and lessons worth drawing on.  More particularly, Levinson asks why Prigg v. Pennsylvania, written by Justice Joseph Story, suffered neither the public obloquy nor the condemnation by professional legal academics directed at Chief Justice Taney for his opinion in Dred Scott, even though Greene notes that Prigg may be the worst Supreme Court decision of all time and Dred Scott, according to Levinson, contains potentially inspirational passages.  We want to believe that the canon and anticanon are separated by an impermeable wall.  But what if they are not? READ MORE

 

Responding to Orin S. Kerr, An Equilibrium-Adjustment Theory of the Fourth Amendment, 125 Harv. L. Rev. 476 (2011).

An Original Take on Originalism

Christopher Slobogin :: In An Equilibrium-Adjustment Theory of the Fourth Amendment, Professor Orin Kerr argues that Fourth Amendment law ought to be structured to ensure that the balance of power between government and citizenry remains constant.  In this response, Professor Christopher Slobogin acknowledges that this equilibrium-adjustment theory is elegant and, because it rests on a relatively “neutral” historical foundation, might be attractive to judges and scholars from different perspectives.  However, contrary to Kerr’s assertion, Slobogin argues that equilibrium adjustment does not easily explain many of the Court’s cases, nor does it help address the most difficult Fourth Amendment issues facing the Court today.  The historical foundations on which it rests are often shaky or insufficiently cognizant of modern preferences.  At bottom, equilibrium-adjustment theory is originalism, and thus suffers from all of the problems associated with that methodology. READ MORE

  January 4, 2012 at 3:55 pm   Posted in: Law Rev (Harvard), Law Rev Contents   Print This Post   Comments Closed

Picking up where we left off…

posted by Nicole Huberfeld

My heartiest thanks to Dan for letting me stick around for another month.  I would like to renew the request I made here for thoughts on mentoring.  Though I appreciated the responsive post and comments that Paul Horwitz generated over at PrawfsBlawg, it did not create the kind of feedback that would allow me to facilitate more information about mentor/mentee opportunities.  So, please feel free to email me or comment here, and I offer again to aggregate any information I receive.

  January 4, 2012 at 12:46 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   Comments (0)

Sherrilyn Ifill’s The Chief Strikes Out

posted by Danielle Citron

Lucky for us, guest blogger and my brilliant colleague Sherrilyn Ifill has written a guest post on Chief Justice Roberts’s defense of the Court’s recusal standards and his dismissal of related concerns with regard to upcoming cases, including the health care challenge.  Here is Professor Ifill’s post entitled “The Chief Strikes Out.”

The Chief Justice of the United States is too polite to tell those of us who’ve raised concerns about Supreme Court ethics and recusal standards to go jump in a lake.  So instead, he invited us to a baseball game.  In his 2011 State of the Judiciary address to Congress, Chief Justice John Roberts invoked the 1919 Chicago White Sox baseball scandal to explain why, in his view, the justices of the Supreme Court need not formally adhere to the Code of Judicial Conduct that governs the conduct of every other judge in the country or modify its current recusal practice.  It’s not worth arguing with the Chief about the significance of the Judge Kennesaw Landis‘ role in resolving what was then the worst scandal in sports history.  I have elsewhere taken issue with what I regard as the Chief Justice’s inadequate conception of the role of umpires in his confirmation hearing opening statement.   But as every true sports fans knows, you can’t win a sports argument.

Justice Roberts deserves credit for devoting his entire State of the Judiciary address to responding to the growing swell of critics in Congress, in the academy and in the advocacy community for changes in the Court’s recusal practice [although very persuasive critiques suggest that the Chief might well have spoken in his remarks directly to the crises effect the lower federal court judges] .  Given the fact that one of the biggest problems with the Supreme Court’s ethics and recusal practices is the silence and secrecy that shrouds them, Roberts’ public and detailed defense constitutes a welcome indication that the Court is willing to engage respectfully with its critics. But Roberts’ forthrightness cannot overcome the fundamental inadequacy of his response to the concerns raised about the Court’s ethics and recusal practice.

I found Justice Roberts’ defense of the status quo in the Supreme Court’s recusal practice to be the most unsatisfying aspect of his remarks.  As the Chief notes, Title 28, section 455 (a) of the United States Code requires federal judges to withdraw from cases in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”  Unlike the Code of Judicial Conduct which, by its express terms does not cover Supreme Court justices, 455(a) applies to justice on the High Court which even Justice Roberts concedes when he tells us that “individual Justices decide for themselves whether recusal is warranted under 455.”  The Supreme Court has said that this standard does not require proof of actual bias and is to be judged by an objective standard, not the subjective view of the judge about his own impartiality.  The standard is based on that of the “reasonable person.”  In this regard, even the mere appearance of bias may require withdrawal.  This comports with the Supreme Court’s view even before 455(a) was amended that include an objective standard that  “justice must satisfy the appearance of justice.”

In addressing the recusal question, Justice Roberts rejects outright calls for Justices Thomas and Kagan to recuse themselves from hearing the case involving challenges to the health care law. But concerns about the Court’s recusal practice transcend the particulars of the health care case.  Questions about the Court’s contemporary recusal practice date back to Chief Justice Rehnquist’s decision to participate in the Laird v. Tatum case in 1973, a year after he had testified before Congress in defense of the surveillance practices at issue, as an Assistant Attorney General in the Nixon Administration, and continued through Rehnquist’s decision sit in the 2000 Microsoft case, potential conflicts among several justices in Bush v. Gore , and through the controversy surrounding Justice Scalia’s duck-hunting trip with then-Vice President Dick Cheney while a case against the Vice President was pending in the Court.

The key issues at the center of the controversy are those of transparency and consistency.  How do individual justices apply the standard for recusal set out in 455(a)?  The Court’s recusal practice is entirely opaque.  Justices are not required to, and most often do not, write decisions explaining why they have declined to recuse themselves from cases in which their withdrawal has been requested by parties.  That’s why Justice Scalia’s 22-page memorandum opinion in response to the duck hunting controversy was so extraordinary and welcome, despite the many flaws in Scalia’s reasoning.  We simply have no sense of how the justices apply the reasonable person standard in recusal cases.

In the absence of an opinion, even when the justices do recuse themselves, the parties and the public have little understanding of the basis upon which an individual justice took that action.  It’s easy enough when there is an actual financial connection between a justice and one of the parties, or when the child or close relative of a justice is a lawyer for one of the parties.  But the “appearance” standard set out in 28 U.S.C. 455 does not require actual bias.  As a result we have very little sense of what – to the understanding of members of the Court – actually constitutes the appearance of partiality.  This has the effect of increasing the controversy when, for example, Justice Thomas’ wife engages in high profile political behavior in opposition to the health care law, and Thomas makes comments that appear to approve her recent conduct.  There is endless speculation, but very little Supreme Court precedent to guide a sound discussion of whether in fact recusal is warranted.

Roberts may be right that neither Thomas nor Kagan should recuse themselves.  But this is not a matter the Chief can simply determine based on his confidence in the integrity of his colleagues.  The question of recusal in neither instance is as much of a slam-dunk as Roberts and some ethicists have suggested, and is entitled to careful consideration by each of the justices in accordance with the standards of 455(a).  While it is a comfort that Justice Roberts has “complete confidence in the capability of his colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted” that is simply not the standard set out in 455, or in the Court’s jurisprudence interpreting that statute. And frankly, many Americans simply do not share that confidence.  Moreover, the lawyers who practice in the Court should have the opportunity to rely on more than the assurances of the Chief, in assessing the adherence of individual justices to the legal standard for recusal. Read the rest of this post »

  January 4, 2012 at 12:14 pm   Posted in: Courts   Print This Post   Comments (2)

Neil Richards on Why Video Privacy Matters

posted by Danielle Citron

Our guest blogger Neil Richards, a Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law, turns his sights on video privacy in this guest blog post.  It whets our appetite for his forthcoming book on Intellectual Privacy.  So here is Professor Richards’s post:

The House of Representatives recently passed an amendment to a fairly obscure a law known as the Video Privacy Protection Act.  This law protects the privacy of our video rental records.  It ensures that companies who have information about what videos we watch keep them confidential, and it requires them to get meaningful consent from us before they publish them.  The House, at the urging of Netflix and Facebook, has passed an amendment that would allow these companies to share our movie watching habits much more easily.  The Video Privacy Act was passed after the Washington City Paper obtained the video rental records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and published them in order to politically discredit him.  It worked.  The Video Privacy Act rests on the enduring wisdom that what we watch is our own business, regardless of our politics.  It allows us to share films we’ve watched on our own terms and not those of video stores or online video providers.

What’s at stake is something privacy scholars call “intellectual privacy” – the idea that records of our reading habits, movie watching habits, and private conversations deserve special protection from other kinds of personal information.  The films we watch, the books we read, and the web sites we visit are essential to the ways we make sense of the world and make up our minds about political and non-political issues.  Intellectual privacy protects our ability to think for ourselves, without worrying that other people might judge us based on what we read.  It allows us to explore ideas that other people might not approve of, and to figure out our politics, sexuality, and personal values, among other things.  It lets us watch or read whatever we want without fear of embarrassment or being outed.  This is the case whether we’re reading communist or anti-globalization books; or visiting web sites about abortion, gun control, cancer, or coming out as gay; or watching videos of pornography, or documentaries by Michael Moore, or even “The Hangover 2.”

For generations, librarians have understood this.  Libraries were the Internet before computers – they presented the world of reading to us, and let us as patrons read (and watch) freely for ourselves. But librarians understood that intellectual privacy matters.  A good library lets us read freely, but keeps our records confidential in order to safeguard our intellectual privacy.   But we are told by Netflix, Facebook, and other companies that the world has changed.  “Sharing” as they call it is the way of the future.  I disagree.  Sharing can be good, and sharing of what we watch and read is very important.  But the way we share is essential.  Telling our friends “hey – read this – it’s important” or “watch this movie – it’s really moving” is one of the great things that the Internet has made easier.  But sharing has to be done on our terms, not on those that are most profitable for business.  Sharing doesn’t mean a norm of publishing everything we read on the Internet.  It means giving us a conscious choice about when we are sharing our intellectual habits, and when we are not.

Industry groups are fond of saying that good privacy practices require consumer notice and consumer choice.  The current Video Privacy Act is one of the few laws that does give consumers meaningful choice about protecting their sensitive personal information.  Now is not the time to cut back on the VPPA’s protections.  Now is the time to extend its protections to the whole range of intellectual records – the books we buy, our internet search histories, and ISP logs of what we read on the Internet.  As a first step, we should reject this attempt to eviscerate our intellectual privacy.

  January 4, 2012 at 11:42 am   Posted in: Legal Theory, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Web 2.0   Print This Post   Comments (0)

January 3, 2012

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To a Worm In Horseradish, the World is Horseradish

posted by Dave Hoffman

I can across this saying recently in a post about the perils of blogging by Todd Henderson.  It allegedly is a Yiddish proverb, made popular in a speech by Malcolm Gladwell.  I’m actually not so sure it’s a real piece of Yiddishkeit.  None of my (Hungarian) Yiddish-speaking relatives have heard of it, and I can’t find the real Yiddish version anywhere.  Rather, I think the expression is best sourced to Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote an English short story with the expression in the title, and who used variants in several other pieces. (If anyone knows different, please feel free to comment.)

Anyway, it’s a useful expression for someone who feels trapped by a bad situation.  I thought I’d pass it along.  It’s an illustration, incidentally, of how bizarre associations can make writing more vivid.  (What’s the worm doing in horseradish?  Why horseradish?  Are worms kosher for Passover?)  It’s also a useful reminder, in this new year, that it’s pretty bad to be a worm in horseradish.

  January 3, 2012 at 7:31 pm   Posted in: Weird   Print This Post   Comments (8)

Vaclav Havel (and thanks for having me back)

posted by Mark Edwards

Thanks so much to Sarah, Dan and the Concurring Opinions crew for inviting me back.

I’d like to use my visit to Concurring Opinions this month mostly to write about Vaclav Havel, who died on December 18th. And because I also blog over at PropertyProf, I’m going to post some of these entries over there as well.

My sense is that most people in the legal academy have a vague idea that Havel was very important during the collapse of East European totalitarianism in 1989, and that he even though he openly admired Frank Zappa he was allowed to be President. All of those things are true, but they badly miss the mark.

Havel’s contribution to the theory and practice of respect for human rights was incisive and profound. He left behind a body of work that merits our serious, sustained attention. If we miss that, we are depriving ourselves of something great and beautiful.

More after the break . . . .

Read the rest of this post »

  January 3, 2012 at 3:47 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (3)

Introducing Guest Blogger Gabriella Coleman

posted by Danielle Citron

I’m thrilled to introduce Professor Gabriella (Biella) Coleman who will be guest blogging with us this month.  Trained as an anthropologist, Professor Coleman researches and teaches on digital activism and the culture and politics of hacking. Her first book, Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking is forthcoming in the fall of 2012 with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism.  She is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Department of Art History and Scientific Literacy at McGill University.  We are so lucky to have Professor Coleman with us–welcome!

  January 3, 2012 at 1:22 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   Comments (0)

How Long is a Senate Recess?

posted by Gerard Magliocca

The constitutional issues surrounding presidential recess appointments are a hardy perennial. Every time the Senate refuses to act on a nomination that is important to the White House, there are noises about making a temporary appointment that expires at the end of that Congress. To block this option, a bipartisan consensus has emerged that the Senate should hold pro forma sessions during what would normally be a recess. That raises the question of what constitutes a recess.  The Justice Department says that the answer is when the Senate is out of session for at least three days.  Where does that come from?

The only textual support comes from Article One, Section 5, which says that “Neither House, during the session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days.” This is the only reference to “three days” in the Constitution.  Of course, that provision refers to an “adjournment,” whereas Article Two, Section Two gives the President the power “to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.” A recess is not necessarily the same as an adjournment.

The historical practice on recess appointments is ambiguous.  It appears that at least two Presidents made recess appointments during a recess of less than three days (Truman and Teddy Roosevelt are cited as the examples) but I have not conducted an independent inquiry to verify that claim.  On the other hand, it probably can’t be right that a recess appointment can be made unless the Senate stays in session round-the-clock.  In theory, of course, the Senate can do that–just start a quorum call that never ends. Josh Chafetz pointed out in a post here that the President does have the power to adjourn Congress when the two Houses disagree about the time of adjournment, but that may not mean that the President can order a recess.

Thoughts on this?

  January 3, 2012 at 12:21 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law   Print This Post   Comments (4)

January 2, 2012

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Happy New Year, Time to Go

posted by Jeffrey Kahn

The New Year has rung in and it is time for me to ring out.  I’ve enjoyed being a guest blogger again at Concurring Opinions very much.  Thanks to Danielle Citron for inviting me back.  It’s been great fun!

  January 2, 2012 at 11:47 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (0)

Space Law and Richard Posner

posted by Gerard Magliocca

So I was doing research on space law (don’t ask), and I learned something new–Richard Posner’s first publication was a book review in the Harvard Law Review entitled “Law and Public Order in Space.”  You can find it at 77 Harv. L. Rev. 1370 (1964).  My favorite line is:

“The most glaring example of the authors’ unwillingness to recognize that their subject has any bounds is the chapter on “Potential Interaction With Advanced Forms of Non-Earth Life” (ch. 9, pp. 974-1021). The problem of men from Mars (and elsewhere) is still, mercifully, in the realm of science fiction, and it is therefore not surprising that the authors have almost nothing to contribute to its solution.”

  January 2, 2012 at 2:41 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized, Weird   Print This Post   Comments (2)

Secure Identities on the Internet

posted by Frank Pasquale

Katharine Gelber offers a thoughtful review of The Offensive Internet in the Australian Review. (David Levine conducted an interview with the book’s editors, Martha Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, available here.) I contributed an essay to this volume, and I found both the other essays in it and the conference it was based on very illuminating. As Gelber notes,

Anyone who believes the Internet to be exclusively, or even primarily, a site for the democratisation of the media or a mechanism to enhance participation in public discourse needs to read this book. This outstanding collection tackles the dark side of the Internet, its use by ‘cyber mobs’, liars, aggressive misogynists and purveyors of hate to distribute their views largely with impunity, while their targets suffer the consequences of this predominantly unregulated arena for speech. . . .

Read the rest of this post »

  January 2, 2012 at 11:36 am   Posted in: Civil Rights, Culture, Current Events, Privacy, Technology   Print This Post   Comments (0)

January 1, 2012

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Introducing Mark Edwards

posted by Sarah Waldeck

  January 1, 2012 at 11:16 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   Comments (0)

Review of “The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan”

posted by Gerard Magliocca

This review is courtesy of “Choice” Magazine, which is published by the American Library Association:

This brief but intriguing book argues that although most studies focus on successful constitutional movements, failure is also instructive, specifically the doomed Populist reforms of the 1890s. Although Bryan failed to gain the presidency and the Populists produced negligible immediate legal reform, Magliocca (Indiana Univ. School of Law) claims that the movement’s effects were dramatic, though unintended. Constitutional doctrine changed radically, becoming more reactionary because of anti-Populist backlash. Virtually all of Magliocca’s contentions will invoke sharp controversy, especially his reliance on a cyclical/generational theory of US politics, yet his sober although provocative assessment of failed reform is powerful and original. Joining the fray concerning realignments, Magliocca shares with Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (1970), a defense of realigning elections as the motors of political change and an assessment of 1896 as a pivotal, realigning election. Magliocca, however, contributes new dimensions to the literature by highlighting the huge constitutional changes produced by the “system of 1896.” A good read for undergraduates and the general public as well as advanced scholars, this history of politics in the Gilded Age presents crucial background for contextualizing contemporary constitutional debates. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. — A. B. Cochran, Agnes Scott College

  January 1, 2012 at 4:21 pm   Posted in: Book Reviews, Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (2)

December 31, 2011

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Pascal on Power and Justice (A Thought for the New Year)

posted by Frank Pasquale

The past few years I’ve tried to find an inspiring quote for the New Year for the blog. There’s a rich vein of insight to be mined from the Carnegie Council podcasts, which I recently discovered on iTunes. One speaker I particularly enjoyed was Krishen Mehta, a former partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers who is now the co-chairman of Global Financial Integrity’s advisory board. Asked about what motivated him to try to stop the shocking abuse of tax havens and mispriced trade by oligarchs, he said the following:

It really is a war against the poor. The inequity that has existed in the past is going to continue unless civil society is informed, asks the right questions of its government, of its business leadership, and asks for more responsibility. One of my favorite writers is Blaise Pascal, who said that “justice and power must be brought together so that whatever is just may be powerful and whatever is powerful may be just.”

A recent study concluded that, “For a salary of between £75,000 and £200,000, tax accountants destroy £47 in value, for every pound they generate.” Mehta, by contrast, is not only creating value, but doing so for the most vulnerable people. How appropriate that a thinker admired by both mathematicians and philosophers would inspire him.

Image Credit: Augustin Pajou. As described on Wikimedia Commons: “Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) studying the cycloid, engraved on the tablet he is holding in his left hand; the scattered papers at his feet are his Pensées, the open book his Lettres provinciales.”

  December 31, 2011 at 7:58 pm   Posted in: Accounting, Law and Inequality, Tax   Print This Post   Comments (1)

So long, and thanks

posted by Nicole Huberfeld

My thanks to Dan and the other regulars at CoOp for sharing their site, it has been a richly rewarding month.  I am grateful for the comments here, by email, over on PrawfsBlawg, and elsewhere, and I look forward to continuing the conversations we have had.  All the best for a happy and healthy 2012!

  December 31, 2011 at 1:30 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (1)

Russian Human Rights Council Recommends Quashing Khodorkovsky’s Conviction

posted by Jeffrey Kahn

Just before Christmas, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights recommended that the December 2010 conviction of Yukos-Oil-CEO-now-prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky be annulled.  That announcement (unfortunately, only available in Russian, but reported by the BBC, among others) coincides with massive street protests not seen in Russia since shortly before Christmas 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. 

The Council’s recommendation was based on a 427-page report on Khodorkovsky’s conviction that the Council gave to President Medvedev.  The report contained the analysis of nine scholars that the Council selected last spring from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States.  I was the American contributor.  The report on the Council’s website is in Russian, but you can find an English-version of my portion of the document here. 

The Khodorkovsky case will be the focus of a “hot topics” panel on Friday morning, January 6, at 10:30 at the AALS Conference in Washington D.C.  How does the case relate to the recent protests in Russia?  What does it say about the rule of law in Russia and prospects for reform?  Come to the panel and find out!

  December 31, 2011 at 9:24 am   Posted in: Civil Rights, Courts, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Current Events, Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (0)

December 30, 2011

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More on the Student Data Grab

posted by Daniel Solove

Here’s another piece critiquing the Education Department’s student data grab.   I am a bit dismayed that this story has barely received coverage from the mainstream media or much general concern by the public.  Many privacy advocacy organizations have been very quiet about it.  I think that these developments are quite troublesome — they are a George W. Bush-esque endeavor, but this time, the reaction is largely ho-hum.  It shouldn’t be.

  December 30, 2011 at 9:19 pm   Posted in: Education, Privacy   Print This Post   Comments (0)

Data Security in Healthcare: Some Startling Statistics

posted by Daniel Solove

A new report by the Ponemon Institute reveals some startling statistics about data security in healthcare:

The frequency of data breaches among organizations in this study has increased 32 percent from the previous year.  In fact, 96 percent of all healthcare providers say they have had at least one data breach in the last two years. Most of these were due to employee mistakes and sloppiness—49 percent of respondents in this study cite lost or stolen computing devices and 41 percent note unintentional employee action. Another disturbing cause is third-party error, including business associates, according to 46 percent of participants.

There is a lot more alarming information in the report.

Self-interest alert: I provide privacy and data security programs to healthcare institutions.

  December 30, 2011 at 9:12 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Medical)   Print This Post   Comments (0)

Posting about Patients on Social Media Sites

posted by Daniel Solove

An increasing problem is caused when medical personnel post details about patients on their social media websites.  From Daily News:

Providence Holy Cross Medical Center officials are investigating an employee who allegedly posted a patient’s medical information on his Facebook page, apparently to make fun of the woman and her medical condition.

According to a printout of the Facebook page obtained by the Daily News, the employee displayed a photo of a medical record listing the woman’s name and the date she was admitted, and posted the comment: “Funny but this patient came in to cure her VD and get birth control.”

Providence officials said the employee was provided by a staffing agency.

An interesting fact in this article is that most healthcare institutions lack policies for employee use of social media:

Only about a third of all hospitals are believed to have specific policies in place regarding patient information and social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, according to published reports.

I expect this to change in the next few years.

Hat Tip: Pogo Was Right

  December 30, 2011 at 9:06 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (Medical)   Print This Post   Comments (0)

Who Owns Twitter Followers?

posted by Daniel Solove

A bizarre lawsuit by a company claiming that it owns a former employee’s Twitter followers:

An Internet company has sued one of its former employees, saying the worker cost the company thousands of dollars in lost business when he took 17,000 Twitter followers with him when he left the firm.

PhoneDog LLC filed a lawsuit in July against Noah Kravitz, a writer who worked for the Mount Pleasant, S.C., company from 2006 until last year. Attorneys for the website, which reviews mobile devices like phones and tablets, said Kravitz owes them $340,000.

The company said when Kravitz resigned, he changed his Twitter name from PhoneDog_Noah to noahkravitz, and kept his 17,000 followers. The company said the followers should be treated like a customer list, and therefore PhoneDog’s property.

PhoneDog said Kravitz should pay $2.50 per follower per month for eight months, or a total of $340,000.

  December 30, 2011 at 8:53 pm   Posted in: Intellectual Property   Print This Post   Comments (0)

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