Why there shouldn't be a reasonable expectation of fairness, i.e. that twitter (or any free service for that matter) will not hand your nickname to another entity? I believe there indeed is an unwritten rule on the Internet, that the nickname should belong to the first person who registered it... I mean, if he didn't violate the trademark at the time of registering the account. Of course, twitter has the right to do it, but still I don't find it normal.
Starting with the first BBSes continuing right through to this day, rule one of the net is: the admin has absolute power. There is a tradition that site owners should be benevolent dictators, an assumption I believe is reasonable as far as private servers are concerned, but which is simply preposterous when we're talking about a multi-million dollar business where users aren't even the ones paying the bills.
So, yes, the "nickname honor code" is an unwritten rule, well it's more of a guideline, a ...suggestion really. The only true rule is rule one, see above.
My larger point is that people think Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Gmail, etc... are basic infrastructure services, and that they are entitled to use them. They pay their ISP fee and believe that includes a Twitter account and the right to use it. I suspect many can't tell the philosophical and technical difference between generic email and Facebook anymore. This leads to a false sense of entitlement and an unreasonable expectation of being treated fairly.
Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Gmail, etc. whether they charge users a fee or not, all present themselves as basic infrastructure services, with an implied expectation that if you register a name with them, that's as good as having a phone number, and it will not be taken away from you unless the service is discontinued.
Legally speaking, Twitter is probably okay here, but if Facebook or Google did the same thing, I would expect they could be legally liable. Google's TOS for example states:
>We take appropriate security measures to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data. These include internal reviews of our data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures, including appropriate encryption and physical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to systems where we store personal data.
It's reasonable to assume that people are using Gmail as a verification email for other services, so they could actually be breaching their own TOS by giving someone's username to someone else, since when you've used a Gmail account for even three months, it becomes personal information that should be protected.
Ethically speaking, all services should be doing due diligence when reassigning usernames. This isn't IRC, all of these services are marketing themselves as identity gateways, and reassigning identities without cause borders on outright fraud. In this case of course, they're actually acting as they normally do, trying to make sure that online identities match legal identities, so it's more understandable, and probably protects them from allegations that they're facilitating fraud. But your authoritarian system is ethically dubious, and furthermore unlikely to hold up in a court of law.
> you seems to take a mental image created in your head by marketing for a contract fine print.
Representations given to a user ("marketing") can constitute an implied contract, or at least a cause of action if they aren't fulfilled. It'd be one thing if Google said up front that their service should be considered unreliable, and may be discontinued at any time, or user accounts even arbitrarily given to third parties. But if they claim otherwise up front, that can be at least somewhat legally binding. Not sure how a court case would turn out, but they aren't automatically in the clear.
Now you are paying for the service and if you stop paying for service it can go to anyone, but that's not the carrier's decision. Telephone numbers are federally regulated.
The Wikipedia article on telephone numbers also suggests that the bureaucracy managing them tries to avoid reassigning disconnected numbers if those numbers are still receiving regular calls. And this makes sense, since people receiving messages intended for someone else is bad for operators, and bad for the users.
As others have noted, there may even be regulations [1] that apply here, though Twitter seems pretty safe from a legal perspective, even if ethically they're in the wrong.
I don't know how to say I don't agree with your first sentence, because I think that the reasonable thing to expect when dealing with issues like this is that unfortunate things are going to happen quite often.
Twitter has how many tens of millions of users? Twitter doesn't need to be an arrogant, corrupt gangster corporation to screw over people many times a day. With the number of complaints they get, I can only imagine the sort of pressure they feel to develop some sort of standardized process for dealing with these issues with an amount of perceived objectivity.
This seems very much like the iOS App Store situation: any system that is designed to make decisions at a sufficient rate (and at a sufficiently low cost) is going to perpetrate injustices. I am quick to flip the bozo bit on people who see dark conspiracies in these sorts of things.
Why is that a reasonable definition of "fair"? I got their "first", so it's mine? That attitude just means that people go around squatting for names.
Seriously: you should have to earn the usage of your name. Before this stupid world where poorly thought-through websites allow people to, for the remainder of all time (or until the company dies), reserve a name, multiple people could use the same name as long as they didn't cause confusion to the populace (at which point it should be expected that the courts become involved, as that is a matter of fraud).
Regardless, if you want to take the definition of "first == fair", GIRLGEEKS had that name in 1999. Everyone is making it sound like "if you don't get a trademark on your name someone else can take it from you", but that totally ignores the fact that they'd have to get a reasonable trademark /before/ you established your name (and conflicts with your use class, which I believe this situation did, and causes confusion, which I can see this situation also doing).
In this case, the thing people should be bothered about is that GIRLGEEKS has a "DEAD" trademark that was cancelled for its use class: they don't have a trademark, and Twitter made a mistake in honoring it.
I don't think so. You want to reference the statute? Domain name conflicts, have to go through a more proper administrative and legal process, for example. Twitter could chose to handle it like a domain name challenge, I believe.
Do you want to reference the statute? Domain name conflicts are not addressed by any legal statute that I know of; it's simply been the policy of the registrars from the start because everybody knew it was going to be a problem. Twitter didn't have that foresight.
The key is this: if this new organization GIRLGEEKS has a trademark, they have a trademark. What's Twitter's motivation to challenge that in court? None whatsoever. If the original @girlgeeks wants to challenge it, she's welcome to do so, but the point is that trademark law does exist, a trademark was granted (even though I think it probably shouldn't have been) and somebody has to foot the bill if it's going to be contested, and as much as I'd like to think it's the person with the money, even I don't think that's Twitter's obligation.
Now, if it were me (and it was, for years, at Despammed.com), I'd say, sorry, that name is taken unless you get a court order, leaving the ball in the court where it should have been to start with. Twitter is obviously more craven than I am, but then I was very small and not concerned with paying a staff.
The point is, if you want rights to a name, just using it on some free service is sadly not enough to get them, and complaining that a large organization is not being fair is no substitute, even if true.
Trademark law does not create a blanket right to use a name in all instances, or to the exclusive right to use a particular string of letters. It creates the right to exclusive use of a mark in a particular "class" of trade so long as you actually use that mark and also show that you have protected it against infringement. (This is also why they're a better system than domain names: it's much harder to "squat" on a trademark.) If the original user of the account was not competing with the organization holding the trademark, not pretending to be them, etc, then the fact they have a trademark is irrelevant.
If you have a consulting company named "thisisourname" and I have a muffin bakery called "thisisourname", we can both have trademarks on that name without any conflict.
I dunno about the statute - you're the one who claimed there was a law requiring Twitter's behavior. You now seem to acknowledge that they DO NOT have to surrender account names merely because someone asserts a trademark claim.
I was pointing out that the domain name process also does not require that a domain owner surrender a domain merely because someone asserts a trademark claim (I can use another's trademark, in cases where I make it clear I am not causing confusion in the market).
I think we are in agreement about a better policy for Twitter; it should let users keep their account names unless required to transfer them via some legal process. I think it would be OK to show some sort of banner on a disputed account's home page, so that visitors are not confused about the true owner - but I don't think it should be just redistributing them.
> I believe there indeed is an unwritten rule on the Internet
key element in your sentence is unwritten.
yes, it's annoying. but no, you have no right when you're sharecropping. and no, and it's not really clear that the @girlgeeks girl has any more right to that name than the @GIRLGEEKS organization. The larger problem here, the elephant in the room perhaps, is the notion of someone "owning" a name or word, combined with the fact that two or more people can simulateously or independently decide they both want to use that name. One party might be the first to create a Twitter account with it. Another party might be the first to create a Facebook page. Another to create a domain name. Another to write song with that title. Another to write a book or story with that title. Another to release a code project with that name. And so on. Inevitably, there will be conflicts. It sucks, but until/unless we have some central globally-unique-and-authoritative Registry of Names For Anything Anywhere with clear written rules, then, this is just going to keep on happening and happening.
Me? Old news. Knew about this flaw prob at least 25 years ago.
[note to self: there's a startup idea and/or political initiative in here somewhere]
