Cyber-Twitter Squatting on Bill Clinton’s Name
Jay Parkhill August 8th, 2007
I recently tuned in to Barack Obama and John Edwards’ Twitter feeds, which offer somewhat interesting, informal glimpses of the candidates. Shortly after, I discovered what is really a fake Bill Clinton Twitter feed. Someone reserved the BillClinton user name and posts asinine garbage that might be malicious if it actually had any relevance to anything.
Still, this got me thinking about “user name squatting”. It is pretty well established that someone with a “famous” name can oust a squatter from a domain name, but I wonder if they same is true of user names on social networks? If I went around and registered “RudyGiuliani” (to pick a famous and unusual name), would he have rights against me? My gut tells me that the larger the platform, the more likely name-squatting would be deemed impactful on the famous person (e.g. Mr. Giuliani). I also suspect that the nature of the platform would be relevant as well- fake Rudy Giuliani on MySpace is potentially more damaging to the candidate than fake Rudy Giuliani on Digg.
I’m going to poke around a little on this one to see if anyone has actually tried to bring “user name squatting” actions. I’ll update if I find anything interesting.
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