'Ardis' Court Orders Return of Social Media Passwords

http://ow.ly/7wy96

An article by Stephen M. Kramarsky posted on law.com on the LTN webpage.

This article discusses social media evidence and how it is dealt with under Intellectual Property Law.

The author states, "Facebook updates and Twitter postings (Tweets) are generally too short to be subject to copyright -- Tweets are limited to 140 characters of plain text and the copyright law generally does not protect short phrases or titles. But such postings are typically collected together in a "stream" that might be deemed a protectable compilation, and to the extent a posting contains protectable elements, such as photographs, New York courts have held that the creator retains rights in those elements, despite the fundamentally public and "shared" nature of the social media environment."

The article further discusses a case involving corporate use of social media, and how this pertains to social media.  "...a business must develop strategies to protect its entire social media "presence." This content typically is not within the direct control of the business -- it resides on the servers of the third-party provider such as Facebook or Twitter -- and it may have been developed and managed by an independent contractor or outside marketing firm. In such complex cases, ownership should be established by contract, but even when contractual relationships exist, enforcement is not always straightforward. These issues were at the heart of a recent decision in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Ardis Health, LLC et al. v. Nankivell"  A link to the case opinion is provided.

The article describes a case in which a defendant whom was responsible for managing the plaintiff's social media networks and internet websites, was terminated but refused to return computers or required access information for the sites.  The article states, "Plaintiffs depend heavily on their online presence to advertise their businesses, which requires the ability to continuously update their profiles and pages and react to online trends. The inability to do so unquestionably has a negative effect on plaintiffs' reputation and ability to remain competitive, and the magnitude of that effect is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify in monetary terms. Such injury constitutes irreparable harm."  Footnotes providing further information about the case are provided in the article.