The estate of an actor who died more than 50 years before Twitter was founded is suing an account that is using his name.
The Twitter account in question, which goes by the handle @JamesDean and has about 8,000 followers, is being sued by commercial estate manager CMG Worldwide, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The firm, which oversees the James Dean licensing empire, has been trying to get Twitter to shut down the account for more than a year but the company has proven to be "extremely uncooperative," CMG president Mark Roesler told The Hollywood Reporter in an exclusive.
The @JamesDean account is run by an anonymous fan but doesn't clarify that it isn't sanctioned by the estate of the "Rebel without a Cause" actor.
The page seems to be an obvious fan account, tweeting photos of the actor, quotes about him and various comments on his life and work, but the bio fails to state that the account isn't officially associated with Dean.
Whoever runs the account tweeted a link to CMG's complaint on Monday morning. Earlier tweets said that the account's email had been compromised by a hacker.
The estate firm reached out to @JamesDean back in 2010, according to a tweet posted on Monday.
"CMG contacted @JamesDean in 2010, asking me to manage the account, which I'd had since 2009," the tweet said. "Have emails to prove."
The firm is wisely pursuing the lawsuit in Indiana, which is said to have extremely generous laws for celebrity and publicity rights.
"No, we did not sanction the James Dean official Twitter account. There is no official Twitter site for James Dean because it's been misappropriated by an individual," Roesler told ABC News.
Roesler has also said that Twitter doesn't believe the account violates the site's trademark policy, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Either way, the case will set a precedent for social media accounts that go by famous names. If CMG wins the lawsuit, the floodgates could open for lawsuits against the countless number of accounts that use the names of dead celebrities.
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