Litigation » Companies Don’t Own Facebook Likes, Florida Judge Rules

Companies Don’t Own Facebook Likes, Florida Judge Rules

August 26, 2014

iStock_Facebook like

When BET decided to revive the TV show The Game, it hired Stacey Mattocks part-time to gain access to the Facebook fan page she had created, which had amassed 2 million “likes.” Working together, Mattocks and BET gained an additional 4 million likes, until Mattocks rescinded BET’s access to the page as leverage to gain full-time employment. BET sued Mattocks for copyright infringement, and had Facebook transfer all the likes to its own page. Mattocks countersued, but a Florida district court judge ruled that “if anyone can be deemed to own the ‘likes’ on a Page, it is the individual user responsible for them.”

Read full article at:

Daily Updates

Sign up for our free daily newsletter for the latest news and business legal developments.

Scroll to Top