Free for a Fee

By Guest Blogger Sruli Yellin

[Eric’s introduction: In the course of blogging over the past 8+ years, I’ve read hundreds or even thousands of cases. This case ranks in my top 1% of most interesting and memorable cases.

Today, we’d call this a cyberbullying case, but when the online attack occurred in 2004, we didn’t have that terminology. The principal plaintiff, DC, was a high school student and an aspiring actor. He had a promotional website for his acting career, including a guestbook. His classmates discovered the website and posted hateful and threatening messages in the guestbook. In 2005, DC and his parents sued the school, the students who posted messages and their parents. A lot has transpired in the past 9 years, and I’ve found it hard to track everything and keep things straight. In this post, my RA Sruli Yellin sorts through the numerous developments.]

D.C. v. R.R. spans more than eight years in court; two appeals (including one to the California Supreme Court); a side suit for malpractice; and an expensive trip to arbitration. Prof. Goldman blogged the case twice (here and here) and discussed it in a recent talk on high schoolers using the Internet. To get a sense of how long this case has been running, it has already lasted over 1/3 of the lives of some of the litigants who were minors when the case was filed.

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An Illinois state appeals court recently held that although an employer that provided network connectivity to its employees is an “interactive service provider” under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the statute does not protect the employer from negligent supervision claims based upon the employee’s alleged use of the network to communicate threats to a third party. The plaintiff claimed that he had notified the employer that the employee was threatening and harassing him, but the employer failed to take action to stop the employee’s conduct. Lansing v. Southwest Airlines Co., 2012 IL App (1st) 101164 (Ill. Ct. App. June 8, 2012).

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Cyber-bullying and defamation

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July 12, 2011

By Eric Goldman

Tatro v. University of Minnesota, 2011 WL 2672220 (Minn. App. Ct. July 11, 2011)

. . .Tatro is a student in University of Minnesota’s mortuary sciences department, a step towards working in a funeral home or as a mortician. She made a series of Facebook posts suggesting she would take violent actions towards her cadaver and perhaps against still-living people, including a post (“I still want to stab a certain someone in the throat with a trocar”) that she admitted she intended for her ex-boyfriend to read. After being alerted to the posts, the university began disciplinary proceedings against her,  . .  .

Tatro claimed she was being improperly disciplined for off-campus behavior. The appellate court disagreed:

. . .

This takes us back to the unresolved question about when online activity is on-campus or off-campus. This question is bedeviling courts in the K-12 context, as we recently saw in the messy en banc opinions from the Third Circuit (see my original post on the Third Circuit rulings). The question doesn’t get any easier when it arises in the university context.

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Lawsuits alleging that a student has engaged in online misbehavior of some sort are so common that enterprising  lawyers may want to consider carving out a specialty in cyber-law or internet torts.

The latest dispute of note involves Musselman High School in Berkeley County, West Virginia. In 2005, the school suspended then high school senior Kara Kowalski  for five days for creating a webpage called “S.A.S.H.,” which stood for “Students Against Sluts Herpes” and which ridiculed a fellow student, according to this opinion yesterday by the 4th Circuit.

Kowalski sued the school and five of its officers, contending that they violated her free speech and due process rights. She claims the school was not justified in disciplining her, because her speech did not occur during a “school related activity,” but rather was “private out-of-school speech,” according to the opinion.

Cut to the conclusion. A unanimous three-judge panel of the court ruled that the school had legal grounds to punish Kowalski.

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The content in this post was found at http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/07/28/court-backs-suspensin-of-high-schooler-for-alleged-online-bullying/?mod=WSJBlog&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Flaw%2Ffeed+%28WSJ.com%3A+Law+Blog%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Cyberbullying is now a recognized social ill, but it also can be a pretty serious crime, as evidenced by a case out of Philadelphia.

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The person uploading videos to YouTube is responsible for getting the consent of the people in them—not the company hosting the videos. Google repeatedly made that point in Italy this week as part of its closing arguments in a case over privacy, triggered by a controversial video of some Italian teenagers bullying a handicapped boy. Depending on which way the Italian court sways, the final decision could affect how online video services are run or served in Italy.

The story started in 2006 with a group of bored high schoolers who had a video-capable cell phone. The teens decided to harass another youth with Down Syndrome, both verbally and by hitting him on the head with a box of tissues. They recorded video of the abuse and then put the video online using Google Video Italia.

The content in this post was found at http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/BAaf and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Cyberbullying is a delicate subject that is better met with education than with laws to criminalize it, testimony before the House Judiciary Committee suggested yesterday. Most experts testifying at the hearing agreed that criminalization would be difficult—both from an enforcement standpoint and also Constitutionally—while education would offer a better approach to some of the nuances of cyberbullying.

The two bills discussed at the Committee hearing were Representative Linda Sanchez’s (D-CA) “Megan Meier Cyber Bullying Prevention Act” and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s (D-FL) “Adolescent Web Awareness Requires Education Act” (H.R. 1966 and H.R. 3630, respectively).

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By Eric Goldman

United States v. Drew, 2:08-cr-00582-GW (C.D. Cal. Aug. 28, 2009)

Almost 2 months ago, the judge presiding over the Lori Drew trial orally announced that he intended to rule in favor of Drew, but it was a little hard to decipher his statements without a written ruling. On Friday, the judge issued his written ruling, which indicates that he granted Drew’s FRCP 29(c) motion for a post-verdict acquittal. I haven’t seen any announcement of the prosecution’s response and whether they plan to appeal. This ruling also has no direct bearing on any civil claims against Drew. Nevertheless, for now, Lori Drew has been fully acquitted of the criminal charges brought against her.

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By Eric Goldman

D.C. v. Harvard-Westlake School, 2009 WL 2500343 (Cal. App. Ct. Aug. 14, 2009)

Harvard-Westlake is a highly-regarded private school in the Los Angeles basin with an impressive alumni roster and a lot of very affluent parents. I’ve known a few alums and, based on their descriptions, they seemed to have a remarkable and resource-rich experience far beyond what I had in public school.

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