Kyle
In a move, that is interesting to say the least, a Colorado Federal Court and a California Federal Court have ruled that social networking accounts, and lists can contain trade secrets.
In the Colorado case an employee of a nightclub was responsible for maintaining the nightclub’s MySpace page. The nightclub had several thousand friends on MySpace and was often used to promote specials, and performances at the club. That was all well and good until the employee left that club to work for a competing night club in the same town.
Once the employee started working for the competitor he started to use the same MySpace friends list to market the new club to the old club’s patrons. In that case Christou v Beatport the judge in Colorado ordered that the MySpace list of friends was protected by the Colorado Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
JDspura.com reported:
The court held that, using the same logic for protection of customer lists, a friends list could be entitled to protection if it meets the traditional tests under which customer lists can constitute trade secrets. The court noted that the list could not readily be compiled from public sources, and that the plaintiff had limited access to the employer’s login and password information.
More after the break
The other case, in California, involves our good friend Noah Kravitz and his former employer PhoneDog and the mysterious Twitter account as reported by our sister site thedroidguy.
The judge in California ruled in favor of Phonedog citing that despite the fact that Kravitz had created the Twitter account in question, since it was called @phondognoah, it was protected .
JDsupra.com reported:
When the defendant refused to relinquish the work-related Twitter account after leaving the company, the plaintiff sued and alleged trade secret misappropriation, arguing that the Twitter password, account information, and followers constituted protectable trade secrets. The court held that the allegations stated a claim, and the lawsuit currently is pending.
While Federal Courts are protecting the business owners in both cases and social networking property of those businesses is being interpreted as “trade secrets”, they are also expected to rule in favor of the account holder in cases where some businesses have been requiring employees and future employees to divulge their private Facebook credentials.
source: JDsupra.com
