Federal Lawsuit between Cybermoguls over Control of OMGFacts Twitter AccountTwitter is Serious Business – just ask Cybermoguls 17-year-old Adorian Deck and by 24-year-old Emerson Spartz.
In 2009, Deck started the Twitter account OMGFacts where he tweeted trivial facts. He gained 300,000 followers within one year. Last year, Spartz approached Deck for a business partnership.
Spartz is the owner of Spartzinc, a network of websites that receives over 6 million unique monthly visitors and has more than 3 million followers on Facebook and Twitter. His portfolio include Mugglenet, one of the most popular Harry Potter fansites, the Twitter account Givesmehope and the high school dating site Flirtlocker.
Deck and Spartz signed a contract that gave Spartz all the rights to the OMGFacts brand and content. Spartz was able to gain over 1.8 million followers for OMGFacts. He also launched an OMWFacts website and YouTube account.
Up till now, Deck only made $100 on the deal. He is striking back at Spartz with a lawsuit, stating that the contract is "predatory" solely aimed to get full control of the account. Deck’s attorney, Glenn Peter, claims that the contract was a ploy to dupe Deck into transferring his rights to the OMGFacts trademark without realizing what he was doing.
Under California law, individuals can disavow any contracts signed when they were minors. But Spartz counters that Deck’s mother co-signed the contract as his legal guardian, and that Deck is trying to exploit SpartzInc for financial gain.
“Among other things, this agreement was designed to protect against Mr. Deck walking away with what we created, which is exactly what he’s trying to do,” Spartz said.
The OMGFacts lawsuit also addresses the question of who legally owns a tweet. How does copyright apply to a tweet?
According to Eric Goldman, a professor of Internet and intellectual property law at Santa Clara Law School: “Because tweets are so short, it can be hard to compose them in a way that earns them full copyright protection. Copyright protects the ways in which we express ourselves; it doesn’t protect the underlying facts or ideas we are expressing.”
To complicate copyright matters even more, Twitter includes a button to “retweet” or repost another user’s tweet, which implies a right to reuse someone else’s material. Collection of tweets or brand identities are also in legal limbo.
Top tweeters/brands like Kim Kardashian (7.4 million followers) can command $10,000 per tweet to endorse a product, and when rapper 50 Cent (4.5 million followers) posted praise of a penny stock in which he was an investor in January 2011, shares of H & H Imports Inc. skyrocketed.
The law is trying to catch up. But as Goldman pointed out: “We’ve had 600 years to develop the rules on books; we’ve had less than five years to develop how those rules apply to tweets.”
