Court requires fired social media employee to return usernames and passwords

Ardis Health, LLC v. Nankivell, 2011 WL 4965172 (S.D.N.Y. October 19, 2011)

Defendant was hired to be plaintiffs’ “video and social media producer,” with responsibilities that included maintaining social media pages in connection with the online marketing of plaintiffs’ products. After she was terminated, she refused to tell her former employers the usernames and passwords for various social media accounts. (The case doesn’t say which ones, but it’s probably safe to assume these were Facebook pages and maybe Twitter accounts.) So plaintiffs sued, and sought a preliminary injunction requiring defendant to return the login information. The court granted the motion for preliminary injunction.

The court found that plaintiffs had come forward with sufficient evidence to support a finding of irreparable harm if the login information was not returned prior to a final disposition in the case:

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.

Defendant argued there would not be irreparable harm because the web content had not been updated in over two years. But the court rejected that argument, mainly because it would have been unfair to let the defendant benefit from her own failure to perform her job responsibilities:

Defendant was employed by plaintiffs for the entirety of that period, and she acknowledges that it was her responsibility to post content to those websites. Defendant cannot use her own failure to perform her duties as a defense.

Moreover, the court found that the plaintiffs would lose out by not being able to leverage new opportunities. For example, plaintiffs had recently hopped on the copy Groupon bandwagon by participating in “daily deal” promotions. The court noted that the success of those promotions depended heavily on tie-ins with social media. So in this way the unavailability of the social media login information also contributed to irreparable harm.

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