Lori Drew was found guilty of three misdemeanor charges, but no
felony charges. Instead of facing up to 20 years in prison, she
could get up to three, but will probably get less.
13 year old commits suicide, bullied by a mother on myspace!Guilty Verdict in Cyberbullying Case Provokes Many Questions
Over Online Identity - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/us/28internet.html?ref=technology
Guilty Verdict in Cyberbullying Case Provokes Many Questions Over
Online Identity
Is lying about one's identity on the Internet now a crime?
The verdict Wednesday in the MySpace cyberbullying case raised a
variety of questions about the terms that users agree to when they log
on to Web sites.
The defendant in the case, a Missouri woman, was convicted by a
federal jury in Los Angeles on three misdemeanor counts of computer
fraud for having misrepresented herself on the popular social network
MySpace. The woman, Lori Drew, posed as a teenage boy in using the
account to send first friendly and then menacing messages to Megan
Meier, 13, who killed herself shortly after receiving a message in
October 2006 that said in part, "The world would be a better place
without you."
<snip>--
This is a case of selective enforcement: Megan Meier also violated
MySpace's terms, which in June 2006 required users to be 14 years of age
or older (she was 13 at the time).
http://www1.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.terms
The prosecutor isn't practicing law here, he's conducting a witch-hunt,
trying to make an example out of Lori Drew.
We've seen this movie before, and we know how it ends: Kevin Mitnick
starred in it. I cannot believe we're letting this abuse of power
happen twice in our lifetime.
Dossy--
The sentiment may have been that Lori Drew needed to be punished, and
computer fraud for misrepresentation were the grounds the prosecutor
saw as his best chance for a conviction. Because legal precedents
inform legal decisions made in the future, so much more is at stake
than the punishment of this one woman.
kim
--
Kevin mitnick was very annoying. And he stole time on gov't owned
machines.
He was not a hardened criminal. The prosecutors did make him famous
for no real purpose. This is a similar witch hunt. I know about kevin. It
was my machine he broke into.
Dan
---
If Megan Meier was 13 or 14, she was a minor. She cannot be subject to
Myspace's terms of service.
How is the fact that she was 13 be of any relevance to this discussion?
Tom
--
Dangerous Precedence Set - Federal Criminal Charges
for Violation of Commercial Online ToS?
A very dangerous legal precedence was set today.
In the case of the 13 year old who committed suicide supposedly over a
MySpace hoax, the mother involved was found guilty on three federal
counts.
What of? Not of a serious criminal act.
She was found guilty on three criminal counts (misdemeanors), in a
federal court, of violating the Terms of Service agreement.
This is not new. In fact, the splash pages for the hotspots operated by
our ISP for retail establishments and hospitality venues have
mentioned it for many years. "Exceeding authorized access"
to a computer network and causing damage to anyone or
anything -- including injury or a nontrivial
financial loss -- is a per se violation of 18 USC 1030.
See
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html
for the details.
This is, in fact, a very good thing. Now that disrupting a computer
network can easily endanger life and limb (e.g. when someone
needs to make a VoIP call in an emergency), it's important that
an ISP be able to prevent, say,
someone who is using P2P from disrupting the operation of the network,
preventing that call from going through by creating excessive jitter or
hogging bandwidth. The statute is fair in that the person can't be
charged for causing a "de minimus" loss or injury. Someone actually
has to be substantially harmed, and in this case of fatal online bullying that
threshold was certainly exceeded.
Brett Glass
--
Speaking solely for myself on this: US Appeals Court Judge Richard
Posner has long argued that many critical laws, such as intellectual
property law, are being superceded by contractual arrangements between
service providers / manufacturers and users / consumers. This is unprecedented
in US history, although it's been tried many times in the past before being
struck down by the courts. For example, book publishers have in the past
tried to "license" books, essentially selling the book under a contract that
would prohibit its resale or lending. If that sounds crazy, remember that's
the current model for software sales: You don't own the product, you
purchase a license that carefully prescribes what you can do with the product.
The idea that I am contractually obligated to do *anything* by some legally
nebulous mumbo-jumbo based on a click through license agreement should
be terrifying to people. Maybe after this, people will wake up. In a Democratic
society, laws should govern our behavior, not unalterable contracts forced
upon us by people who answer to no one.
dave--