August 2009

A reader recently joined Twitter and found a number of other users who were tweeting about a topic that interested him. They were using a specific hash tag to identify the topic, so he began adding that tag to his own related tweets as well.
Shortly thereafter, someone contacted him claiming that his organization owned the hash tag and had even set their Twitter user name to the same thing. The organization demanded that my reader stop using the tag, so he wanted to know if this was fair game.