Does a Company Own Its Facebook Likes?

Collect all the “likes” you want on Facebook. They’re not really yours. So says a district court judge in Florida, cutting down a woman’s attempt to wrestle several million Facebook “likes” away from BET’s official fan page for its comedy-drama The Game.

The story (of the legal dispute, not the television show) begins in 2008, when Stacey Mattocks started a fan page for The Game. Soon thereafter, the show went off the air, but the Facebook page lived on. When BET decided to revive The Game in 2010, the network reached out to Mattocks, offering to give her part-time work maintaining her page as the show’s official fan page. BET wasn’t eager to start from scratch: Mattocks had already gathered about 2 million “likes,” according to court documents.