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Section 512(f) of the DMCA says pretty clearly that anyone who "knowingly materially misrepresents under this section... that material or activity is infringing... shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees", which would seem to apply here; the EFF argues that Universal should have reasonably known that the video obviously constituted fair use. In a Law.com article about the case, attorney Kelly Klaus, representing Universal, countered that "Congress also said that there was another remedy, which is the counter-notice procedure, which is what happened here." But this seems to miss the point -- the DMCA says that the remedies are the counter-notice procedure and an award for attorney's fees. (Klaus's firm did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Anyway, as EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry points out, if there were no possible award for attorney's fees against copyright holders who make false accusations, then there would be no disincentive for copyright holders not to file frivolous accusations in the first place.

I'm an EFF member and support their request for attorney's fees, but let's play devil's advocate. Suppose you were an indie musician who sold your songs online, and you found a number of YouTube videos that used your song without permission, so you sent a long list of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube. Included in that list was one video that used only a brief portion of your song, short enough to count as fair use. Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?

On the other hand, if the EFF doesn't get their attorneys fees, then they have to eat the cost of the work they did, and that doesn't seem fair either.

The problem is that once you have a $400,000 bill on the table, someone has to pay it, which punishes one or both parties usually vastly out of proportion to any wrongdoing. ($400,000 is almost half of what Reebok had to pay when one of their lead-tainted bracelets killed a child.) Huge attorney's fees awards also limit access to the court system for plaintiffs who might have a reasonable case, but can't afford the risk of having to pay attorney's fees if they lose, and for defendants who might also have a reasonable case, but are under pressure to settle quickly to avoid the risk of a huge attorney's fees award against them.

This suggests an economics / game theory problem: Could you come up with a system that takes into account the incentives of parties on both sides, and that prevents huge legal bills from being generated?

Now, any argument about the legal system usually raises two kinds of objections. The first is that the existing system "works". Well, in many ways it does, but everybody also knows that wealthy corporations and individuals enjoy a huge advantage in the court system, even though courts are supposed to treat all parties equally. So at least in that respect it doesn't "work" the way it's supposed to. The second objection is that it's too hard to change the rules and traditions that are built into legal proceedings, so it's better just to work within the system. True, but that's not the question I'm asking. I'm posing it as a logical brainteaser: If you had carte blance to modify the way that legal disputes were held, could you do it in a way that respects the rights and interests of all parties and still minimizes the legal fees incurred? (Whether I'm right or wrong, my goal is to make this argument more interesting to mathematicians and game theorists, than to lawyers; otherwise, I've failed.)

From a game-theoretic point of view, you might argue that large attorney's fees serve a useful purpose by discouraging frivolous lawsuits. The problem is that the fees don't just discourage frivolous lawsuits but also non-frivolous lawsuits where there's a reasonable chance of losing. On the other hand, a person who is already broke would have little disincentive to file a frivolous lawsuit, since the worst that can happen is that they'd get hit with a huge award for attorney's fees and have to declare bankruptcy, which they might consider worth the risk for a small shot at a million-dollar payout. So assume that attorney's fees are not themselves the best way to deter frivolous lawsuits, and that avoiding large fees in general is still a desirable thing. How do you design rules to achieve that?

I think you could save a lot of money by enforcing a rule that a lawyer is not allowed to seek attorney's fees from the other side for arguing any points that the other side offered to concede anyway. So the incentive would be that if party A's lawyer concedes some point of fact or point of law, and party B ultimately wins the case and an award for attorney's fees, then party B is not allowed to seek attorney's fees for arguing the point conceded by party A's lawyer.

In all of my legal cases where the other side was represented by a lawyer who was getting paid by their client up front, it was clear from reading the other side's briefs (and my own lawyers agreed with me) that opposing counsel had spent a lot of time spinning their wheels and arguing obvious or irrelevant points before getting to the crux of the dispute. If their client wants to pay them for that busy-work, that's between them and their client, but if they had won the case and an award for attorney's fees, I would have objected that they shouldn't be allowed to charge us for time they spent arguing points that we would have given to them anyway. The hypothetical savings from implementing and enforcing this rule, are not trivial.

So how does game theory predict that the two sides would behave under this rule? Suppose MegaCorp is suing or being sued by IndieActivist. MegaCorp's first priority is to win, and if possible to hit IndieActivist with a huge award for attorney's fees to discourage other would-be IndieActivists. MegaCorp doesn't want to lose, but if they do lose, they don't much care about the attorney's fees award they would have to pay to IndieActivist's lawyers. In this scenario, they would be expected to concede very little, disputing trivial points in order to drag out the case as long as possible, hoping that IndieActivist's lawyers would run out of time or money and pressure their client to settle. In other words, MegaCorp would behave about the same as they would under the existing rules.

For IndieActivist, on the other hand, their first priority is to win, but they also care very much about not having to pay a staggering award for attorney's fees if they lose. So they would be expected to concede any points of fact or law, even if favorable to MegaCorp, if those points are so obvious that they don't think the judge would be likely to rule in their favor on those questions anyway. This way, even if IndieActivist loses and has to pay attorney's fees to MegaCorp, those fees would be limited to the time spent arguing the actual point of disagreement that formed the crux of the lawsuit.

Suppose, for example, that Universal had actually sued Lenz for violating Prince's copyright by using a 30-second excerpt of his song in her video. Lenz or her lawyers could have filed a brief conceding all the obvious points that they would expect Universal's lawyers to make: Prince was the holder of the copyright, the copyright had been filed with the Copyright Office, Lenz never sought permission for using the recording, etc. Very quickly, the whole case could be distilled down to: "Show this video to the judge and let them decide if it qualifies as 'fair use'." Any effort spent arguing any points beside that, is wasteful. And if the legal system encourages lawyers to rack up billable hours arguing other points, then the system is wasteful. Concede the obvious, and everybody's costs are kept under control.

This only partially addresses the problem of large attorney's fees, because it still leaves the fees that are generated in the process of arguing points that the other side wouldn't concede. Solving this problem is much harder, because while you can simply eliminate the work that's spent on arguing points that the other side would give to you anyway, you can't eliminate the work spent on points that are genuinely in dispute, you can only try to make that work shorter and cheaper. I've argued for my own fairly complicated remedy in a separate article, but my main point was that legal costs aren't driven up so much by the complexity of the law as by the ambiguity in it. The Windows programming interface, after all, is also very complex, but if you can write a clear description of what you want a simple program to do, you can often get a programmer to write the program for you for dirt cheap. In arguing a legal case, on the other hand, the number of possible outcomes grows exponentially with each point of ambiguity in the law where there's no way to predict how the judge will interpret a particular rule.

But still, even if you can't reduce the ambiguity in how a legal question will be interpreted, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary attorney's fees by distilling the case just down to that particular question. Is it fair use to use a 30-second clip of Prince's song in a video of a dancing toddler? Let the judge decide. But if that's the one and only point that both sides can't agree on, then neither side should be able to bill for time spent arguing about anything else.

Perhaps someone mathematically or logically inclined can come up with a better algorithm for avoiding the billing hours generated by arguing the obvious. I'm not entirely happy with my own solution, because it still allows MegaCorp to concede absolutely nothing, and to try and bleed IndieActivist dry by forcing them to argue even the most trivial points. IndieActivist's lawyer could be reimbursed for that time if they win and get an award for attorney's fees, but they might run out of money or patience before then. To counter this tactic, you could allow either side to seek penalties for Frivolously Arguing The Super-Obvious. If IndieActivist's lawyer wants MegaCorp to concede an obvious point and MegaCorp won't do it, IndieActivist could seek a FATSO penalty, and the judge could decide whether to award them that penalty if the point is really and truly obvious, without deciding on the merits of the case as a whole. The penalty doesn't have to be large enough to hurt MegaCorp, it just has to be large enough to compensate IndieActivist's lawyer for their time, so that MegaCorp can't run them into the ground by forcing them to argue every point unnecessarily. However, economic game theorists might think of some unintended consequence of the FATSO rule. Could MegaCorp flood IndieActivist's lawyer with a gigantic list of requested concessions, so that if IndieActivist's lawyer screws up and forgets to concede one of the points that the judge turns out to consider "obvious", MegaCorp could hammer them with a FATSO award too? It's hard to anticipate all the ways that either party might abuse a new rule of the game.

Meanwhile, under the existing system, while it may be unfair to Universal in some cosmic sense that they have to pay out $400,000 for sending one mistaken DMCA takedown notice, it would be more unfair to force the EFF to eat those costs, and in any case the DMCA does clearly allow for an award of attorney's fees. But it would be better for everyone in the long run -- especially for the EFF and the kind of relatively powerless clients that they usually represent -- if there were more ways to keep legal costs from spiraling out of control in the first place.

When I first heard that Yahoo had been sued because they refused to remove a page created by the ex-boyfriend of a woman named Cecilia Barnes to impersonate her -- portraying her as a slut looking for sex with strangers (who obliged by hounding her office with phone calls and e-mails) -- I thought Yahoo's conduct was indefensible. Even though, as the court ruled, they may have been exempt from liability under the Communication Decency Act of 1996, what possible excuse could Yahoo have had for the way they handled the situation, exposing Barnes to months of harassment, when it would have taken them only seconds to review the page, see that it was obviously causing harm, and remove it?

Then I thought more about the consequences of the rule that I was implicitly advocating by making that argument. Obviously, if an ISP has a policy of removing a user's page if some third party merely complains that the page is impersonating them, then one of your enemies could get your page removed by filing a complaint saying that they were really "you", and that your page was impersonating them. But if the ISP has a policy of not acting on such complaints, then someone could create a user account pretending to be you, and you wouldn't be able to get it removed.

In both cases, there are two problems. One is the fact that the ISP has to have a way to figure out who is telling the truth. The second is that the solution has to scale well, even for a company like Yahoo that probably gets so many complaints about user conduct every day that it would be impossible to read them all. It should be possible for genuine complaints about impostors, to reach the attention of the right people and get an account closed, without accounts being shut down because of (a) people who file complaints about 'rude behavior' that get unintentionally mixed in with 'impostor' complaints by someone who is too overworked to read them all very carefully; or (b) people who file outright false complaints that a given account is an 'impostor', just to get it shut down; or (c) people who are really sneaky, and file complaints about things like rude behavior, but who craft the complaints in a way that is deliberately designed to get them mixed in with the 'impostor' reports, in order to get the account shut down (this way, if the complainer ever sued or otherwise confronted about the complaint that they filed, they can say that they "didn't lie"!).

It's hard to think of a solution that covers all of these bases. For example, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology explained how many ISPs use faxed driver's licenses to decide impersonation complaints:

In many cases involving real people, the challenged site (whether it is a legit site or a bogus site) contains one or more photographs of the person involved. What service providers do in this case is to get the person to submit a copy of their driver's license, and the provider decides whether the person submitting the license is the same person depicted in the photos. And if so, that person is the one who can control whether the site stays up or not. This works in lots of cases (because pictures are often, but certainly not always, involved).

The problem is that even this could be abused when used against a company like Yahoo that handles an extremely high volume of complaints. Suppose that Yahoo publishes a standard procedure for submitting complaints about impersonation, that includes the requirement of a faxed driver's license. Abusers of the system would figure this out, and they could start filing "complaints" against users and websites by faxing in complaint letters along with a copy of their driver's license, where the letters were not complaints about impersonation at all, but just bogus complaints about other things like "This guy was mean to me". Because the driver's license accompanying the letter is real and the statements in the letter are true (or at least a matter of opinion), the complainer can't be accused of lying or forging government documents. And if anyone ever challenged them and asked, "Why did you send your driver's license with the complaint letter? Weren't you trying to trick the ISP into thinking that this was an impersonation complaint so they would take it seriously?", the complainer could play dumb and say, "Well, I heard that if you file a complaint against someone, you're supposed to fax your driver's license with it." But if Yahoo is still getting too many messages to sort through them carefully, some of these crank complaints could still get users' accounts shut down.

So now you have an interesting, non-trivial problem. Before reading further, it's worth thinking about how you would solve this. What's a good policy that would honor legitimate complaints, without giving cranks a way to get their enemies' pages shut down for no reason, and that would scale well for large companies like Yahoo? There are really two questions here: (1) What would you do if you were drafting an ISP policy and trying to balance the interests of all parties? and (2) What would you do if you were drafting a law requiring ISPs to implement certain policies, also while balancing the interests of all parties? (The best solution may be no law at all, but I think you would have to argue that position, rather than taking the default libertarian stance and simply assuming that. After all, the "no law" status quo didn't do much good for people like Cecilia Barnes who had a legitimate grievance and couldn't get anybody to listen.)

The non-verifiability of complaints is the same problem that I've posed to hard-core anti-spam advocates who have said that ISPs should have a zero-tolerance policy towards spam and cancel any account that is generating spam complaints. The problem with that is that unless the ISP has logs of all mail sent out by a customer (and if the customer is leasing a dedicated server, this would usually not be the case), the ISP can't tell for sure if a spam complaint is real or not. If they adopt a policy of removing a site in response to a complaint (or three or ten complaints), then someone could easily get one of their enemies' sites shut down by filing phony spam complaints sent from multiple Hotmail or Gmail accounts. (You would have to forge some e-mail headers to make it look convincingly like the spam came from the site in question, but this is not very difficult.) If the hosting company has a policy of kicking customers off in response to some threshold number of spam complaints, then a dedicated adversary could just file that many complaints until the customer was terminated. On the other hand, if the hosting company won't kick off customers for any number of spam complaints, then they have no deterrent against their customers spamming. (This is mostly an academic question, because I tried filing complaints against all the dozens of spammers who spammed me in a given one-day period a few years ago, and none of the hosting companies terminated any of the sites I complained about. I wouldn't have expected any of them to terminate a customer based on one complaint, but I assume that some of the hosting companies were getting spam complaints about those customers from other people as well.)

The big difference between spam incidents and impersonation incidents, is that while there may be no reliable record of whether a piece of mail was sent in the past or not, the fact of whether the Yahoo user "bennetthaselton" really is Bennett Haselton is something that can be determined with evidence that still exists in the present day. Some kinds of evidence are more readily available than others. If I were drafting an internal policy for an ISP on when to remove pages in response to an impersonation complaint, I would take care of the low-hanging-fruit cases first:

• If the page directs people to contact the page owner at an e-mail address or phone number (as the page created by Barnes' ex-boyfriend did), and you e-mail the address or call the number and someone answers by saying, "No, I didn't create that page, it's a fake", then you don't need to do any checking of the real-world identities of the parties involved -- all you need to know is that the page purports to be created by the owner of that phone number, but it isn't, so it's a fake and should be removed. This would take care of the most vicious cases of goading visitors into harassing someone directly.

  (Although I'd make clear in the policy that this wouldn't apply to consumer pages about companies, telling visitors to call such-and-such a company to complain about their conduct. Encouraging people to air their grievances is legitimate as long as the page owner isn't claiming to actually represent the company. I'm ducking the question of whether this should apply to pages about individuals -- if I make a page saying, "My ex is a skank, call her at this number for a 'good time'," am I infringing on her rights? But since I'm not claiming to be her, the situation wouldn't be covered by a policy about impersonation pages.)

• If the page is created by a paid user, then you can check if the real name on file with their credit card information, matches the name on the site. If it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily mean the page is a fake (possibly one person paid for the account while another one created the content), but if it does match, the page owner is probably not guilty of impersonating anyone. (Here I'm ducking the question of what to do if someone shares their name with a celebrity -- for example, if your name really is Julia Roberts and you create a page saying "Hi, I'm Julia Roberts", that's probably not enough to count as impersonation. But what if you talk about your interest in film and your exploits as an actress in local community theater, how much are you allowed to let people think that you might be "the Julia Roberts?)

• If the page violates the hosting company's Terms of Service in other ways, then it can be removed without determining whether the page owner is guilty of impersonation or not. The Yahoo Terms of Service doesn't actually mention sexual content (they used to allow users to post "adult profiles" in their Yahoo Profiles accounts as long as the profile owner flagged them as such), but the document prohibits content that is "vulgar" or "...otherwise objectionable". I haven't seen the page created by Barnes's ex-boyfriend soliciting strangers for sex, but it probably violated the Terms of Service in itself.

And there may be other low-hanging-fruit options that I'm not thinking of. But what if there is no easy call, because none of these simplifying factors apply? A user creates a profile on a free site claiming to be Mr. X. A third party complains that they are the real Mr. X and that the profile is fake. What should the ISP do, if they don't want to spend money verifying the real-world identities of the parties involved, every time they get a crank complaint about any users on their system?

This is essentially an economics problem. Cecilia Barnes wasn't asking Yahoo to do anything that would have been too burdensome for them -- the "labor" required to look at a faxed copy of her driver's license probably wouldn't have cost more than $5, at which point Yahoo could have initiated the process of shutting the page down, which they already have built-in procedures for. The benefit to her of getting the page shut down could have been valued in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Normally, when you need someone else to do something that costs them $5 worth of effort and brings you $1,000 worth of benefit, the natural arrangement is to pay them, but Yahoo doesn't offer this as an option.

In fact, I assume the real cost to Yahoo here would not have been actually reviewing Barnes's complaint, but actually finding it buried among all the bogus complaints that they receive, and noticing that it had real merit. Again, including a $5 payment would be one way to ensure that your complaint gets taken more seriously than all the others. But while the $5 fee might have helped in this specific situation, it's easy to imagine how that could set a bad precedent -- ISPs charging exhorbitant fees for users to submit abuse complaints to them, or users not filing complaints because they didn't want to share their payment information or pay money at all.

So, rather than paying a small fee directly, a better approach might be to require complainants to post some sort of "bond" -- which may not be something financial, as some examples will show -- in order to get their complaint to the front of the queue. Recall the example of submitting your driver's license along with an impersonation complaint. It's important to understand the subtle reason why this procedure actually works. It's not because someone couldn't still file a bogus complaint with a phony ID. (While it's somewhat hard to create a fake driver's license that you can hold in your hand, creating a fake faxed driver's license would be easy.) It's because if the complainant is lying, now they can be prosecuting for forging government documents. Essentially the complainant is posting their freedom as a "bond", going out on a limb and saying: "I can't prove to you that I'm telling the truth. But now you know that if I'm lying, I'll go to jail. Bet you the other guy won't be willing to make a binding promise like that."

So naturally I'd put that in the ISP's policy as well: If someone sends in a complaint about our user impersonating them, and they're willing to fax in a copy of their government ID proving that they are who they say they are, and we can verify that the page owner is claiming to actually be that person (and not merely complaining about that person or their business), then we would remove the page unless the account owner can submit even more compelling evidence that they are who they say they are.

This addresses the problem of the impersonation complaints that are completely fake. However, you still have the problem of what to do about people who fax in their driver's license along with letters saying "This guy is a jerk", hoping to get someone's account closed down. If a company like Yahoo is too big to read through all the complaints carefully, then it becomes hard to sort through the complaints to see which ones are really about impersonation and which ones are about other behavior that doesn't violate their TOS.

What might be a solution would be to borrow some of the non-terrible aspects of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The two most controversial provision of the DMCA are (1) a ban on software that enables the user to circumvent copyright restrictions, and (2) a requirement that ISPs have to respond to copyright-violation "takedown" notices in a certain manner. As I've said before about the DMCA, I'm opposed to #1 in principle because I think software should be protected by the First Amendment; I'm not against #2 in principle, but just concerned about how it could be abused in practice.

But one thing the DMCA does is solve the "sorting problem" -- how to get complaints about copyright violations to the top of the pile. Service provides often have a procedure for handling DMCA complaints that is separate from the regular complaint channels. The DMCA also provides protection for users against phony complaints, by stipulating that anyone who files a false complaint can be sued for statutory damages and attorney's fees, as in a case where Diebold, Inc. agreed to pay $125,000 as a penalty for sending false "takedown" notices. In other words, the DMCA solves the "bonding" problem too -- by sending a DMCA complaint, a user is effectively saying, "I agree to pay big money if I'm lying. So, I'm probably telling the truth."

So, a law addressing how ISPs should handle "impersonation" pages, modeled after the DMCA to solve the "top of the pile" problem and the "binding promise" problem, might go something like this:

• For a user to file a complaint, the complaint should cite the name of the anti-impersonation law, as in, "This complaint is being filed under the Anti-Impersonation Act of 2009". This gives ISPs an easy way to sort these complaints to the top of the pile, the same way that they have specialized channels for handling DMCA complaints.
• In the complaint, the user has to assert unambiguously that the page they are complaining about is impersonating them, and is not merely posting gripes about them or their business.
• The complaint should include a copy of a government-issued ID. (Again, this is not because this is hard to forge, but because now the complainant is promising, "If this is fake, I'll go to jail.")
• If the impersonation page is directing visitors to call a phone number or e-mail an e-mail address, and the takedown notification to the ISP includes a request to call that number or e-mail that address to verify that it doesn't actually belong to the page owner, then the ISP should follow up on that within a given time period of receiving the complaint. (And once they call that number or e-mail that address and get a response saying, "No, that page is definitely not mine", then the ISP should shut the page down.)
• Anyone who files a phony complaint citing that statute, can be held liable for statutory damages and attorney's fees, and if they faxed a phony government ID, then they can be prosecuted for that as well.

The problem-solver in me says that this is one way to ensure that legitimate complaints will be acted on, while making phony complaints much harder and riskier. It also seems to me that this is a minimal solution, in the sense that if you remove any part of it, it no longer solves the problem. For example, if you remove the part about complaints having to cite the anti-impersonation law, then you no longer have an effective means for these complaints to get to the top of the pile. And if you remove the part about civil penalties for filing phony complaints, then you no longer have any disincentive for people to tie up the system with crank complaints trying to get their enemies' accounts cancelled. Perhaps others can come up with an alternative solution that meets the logical requirements of enabling real complaints while discouraging fake ones. Meanwhile, the civil libertarian in me doesn't get a queasy feeling from it right away. It seems that it could only be used to stop cases of actual impersonation, and even as a free speech advocate I don't think that you have the moral right to impersonate someone else in a non-satirical manner for the purpose of actually deceiving or harassing people.

But even the absence of such a law is hardly an excuse for what Yahoo did. All they had to do is go to the page, look at the phone number, call the number and hear her say, "Yes, this is me and no that's not my page", and shut it down. The fact that they couldn't do this, shows a contempt for the process of handling legitimate complaints. Apart from the harm caused to Cecilia Barnes directly, incidents such as these might lead to Congress narrowing the scope of the immunity given to providers for hosting content posted by their users. Of course I'm technically suggesting a law that would narrow the scope of that immunity too, but only in a very narrowly prescribed way. If, on the other hand, Congress or the courts ever adopt the vague principle that providers can be held "jointly responsible" for whatever their users say once they've been "made aware" of it, it's going to get a lot harder for people to find Web hosting who have anything controversial to say.

When I first heard that Yahoo had been sued because they refused to remove a page created by the ex-boyfriend of a woman named Cecilia Barnes to impersonate her -- portraying her as a slut looking for sex with strangers (who obliged by hounding her office with phone calls and e-mails) -- I thought Yahoo's conduct was indefensible. Even though, as the court ruled, they may have been exempt from liability under the Communication Decency Act of 1996, what possible excuse could Yahoo have had for the way they handled the situation, exposing Barnes to months of harassment, when it would have taken them only seconds to review the page, see that it was obviously causing harm, and remove it?

Then I thought more about the consequences of the rule that I was implicitly advocating by making that argument. Obviously, if an ISP has a policy of removing a user's page if some third party merely complains that the page is impersonating them, then one of your enemies could get your page removed by filing a complaint saying that they were really "you", and that your page was impersonating them. But if the ISP has a policy of not acting on such complaints, then someone could create a user account pretending to be you, and you wouldn't be able to get it removed.

In both cases, there are two problems. One is the fact that the ISP has to have a way to figure out who is telling the truth. The second is that the solution has to scale well, even for a company like Yahoo that probably gets so many complaints about user conduct every day that it would be impossible to read them all. It should be possible for genuine complaints about impostors, to reach the attention of the right people and get an account closed, without accounts being shut down because of (a) people who file complaints about 'rude behavior' that get unintentionally mixed in with 'impostor' complaints by someone who is too overworked to read them all very carefully; or (b) people who file outright false complaints that a given account is an 'impostor', just to get it shut down; or (c) people who are really sneaky, and file complaints about things like rude behavior, but who craft the complaints in a way that is deliberately designed to get them mixed in with the 'impostor' reports, in order to get the account shut down (this way, if the complainer ever sued or otherwise confronted about the complaint that they filed, they can say that they "didn't lie"!).

It's hard to think of a solution that covers all of these bases. For example, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology explained how many ISPs use faxed driver's licenses to decide impersonation complaints:

In many cases involving real people, the challenged site (whether it is a legit site or a bogus site) contains one or more photographs of the person involved. What service providers do in this case is to get the person to submit a copy of their driver's license, and the provider decides whether the person submitting the license is the same person depicted in the photos. And if so, that person is the one who can control whether the site stays up or not. This works in lots of cases (because pictures are often, but certainly not always, involved).

The problem is that even this could be abused when used against a company like Yahoo that handles an extremely high volume of complaints. Suppose that Yahoo publishes a standard procedure for submitting complaints about impersonation, that includes the requirement of a faxed driver's license. Abusers of the system would figure this out, and they could start filing "complaints" against users and websites by faxing in complaint letters along with a copy of their driver's license, where the letters were not complaints about impersonation at all, but just bogus complaints about other things like "This guy was mean to me". Because the driver's license accompanying the letter is real and the statements in the letter are true (or at least a matter of opinion), the complainer can't be accused of lying or forging government documents. And if anyone ever challenged them and asked, "Why did you send your driver's license with the complaint letter? Weren't you trying to trick the ISP into thinking that this was an impersonation complaint so they would take it seriously?", the complainer could play dumb and say, "Well, I heard that if you file a complaint against someone, you're supposed to fax your driver's license with it." But if Yahoo is still getting too many messages to sort through them carefully, some of these crank complaints could still get users' accounts shut down.

So now you have an interesting, non-trivial problem. Before reading further, it's worth thinking about how you would solve this. What's a good policy that would honor legitimate complaints, without giving cranks a way to get their enemies' pages shut down for no reason, and that would scale well for large companies like Yahoo? There are really two questions here: (1) What would you do if you were drafting an ISP policy and trying to balance the interests of all parties? and (2) What would you do if you were drafting a law requiring ISPs to implement certain policies, also while balancing the interests of all parties? (The best solution may be no law at all, but I think you would have to argue that position, rather than taking the default libertarian stance and simply assuming that. After all, the "no law" status quo didn't do much good for people like Cecilia Barnes who had a legitimate grievance and couldn't get anybody to listen.)

The non-verifiability of complaints is the same problem that I've posed to hard-core anti-spam advocates who have said that ISPs should have a zero-tolerance policy towards spam and cancel any account that is generating spam complaints. The problem with that is that unless the ISP has logs of all mail sent out by a customer (and if the customer is leasing a dedicated server, this would usually not be the case), the ISP can't tell for sure if a spam complaint is real or not. If they adopt a policy of removing a site in response to a complaint (or three or ten complaints), then someone could easily get one of their enemies' sites shut down by filing phony spam complaints sent from multiple Hotmail or Gmail accounts. (You would have to forge some e-mail headers to make it look convincingly like the spam came from the site in question, but this is not very difficult.) If the hosting company has a policy of kicking customers off in response to some threshold number of spam complaints, then a dedicated adversary could just file that many complaints until the customer was terminated. On the other hand, if the hosting company won't kick off customers for any number of spam complaints, then they have no deterrent against their customers spamming. (This is mostly an academic question, because I tried filing complaints against all the dozens of spammers who spammed me in a given one-day period a few years ago, and none of the hosting companies terminated any of the sites I complained about. I wouldn't have expected any of them to terminate a customer based on one complaint, but I assume that some of the hosting companies were getting spam complaints about those customers from other people as well.)

The big difference between spam incidents and impersonation incidents, is that while there may be no reliable record of whether a piece of mail was sent in the past or not, the fact of whether the Yahoo user "bennetthaselton" really is Bennett Haselton is something that can be determined with evidence that still exists in the present day. Some kinds of evidence are more readily available than others. If I were drafting an internal policy for an ISP on when to remove pages in response to an impersonation complaint, I would take care of the low-hanging-fruit cases first:

• If the page directs people to contact the page owner at an e-mail address or phone number (as the page created by Barnes' ex-boyfriend did), and you e-mail the address or call the number and someone answers by saying, "No, I didn't create that page, it's a fake", then you don't need to do any checking of the real-world identities of the parties involved -- all you need to know is that the page purports to be created by the owner of that phone number, but it isn't, so it's a fake and should be removed. This would take care of the most vicious cases of goading visitors into harassing someone directly.

  (Although I'd make clear in the policy that this wouldn't apply to consumer pages about companies, telling visitors to call such-and-such a company to complain about their conduct. Encouraging people to air their grievances is legitimate as long as the page owner isn't claiming to actually represent the company. I'm ducking the question of whether this should apply to pages about individuals -- if I make a page saying, "My ex is a skank, call her at this number for a 'good time'," am I infringing on her rights? But since I'm not claiming to be her, the situation wouldn't be covered by a policy about impersonation pages.)

• If the page is created by a paid user, then you can check if the real name on file with their credit card information, matches the name on the site. If it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily mean the page is a fake (possibly one person paid for the account while another one created the content), but if it does match, the page owner is probably not guilty of impersonating anyone. (Here I'm ducking the question of what to do if someone shares their name with a celebrity -- for example, if your name really is Julia Roberts and you create a page saying "Hi, I'm Julia Roberts", that's probably not enough to count as impersonation. But what if you talk about your interest in film and your exploits as an actress in local community theater, how much are you allowed to let people think that you might be "the Julia Roberts?)

• If the page violates the hosting company's Terms of Service in other ways, then it can be removed without determining whether the page owner is guilty of impersonation or not. The Yahoo Terms of Service doesn't actually mention sexual content (they used to allow users to post "adult profiles" in their Yahoo Profiles accounts as long as the profile owner flagged them as such), but the document prohibits content that is "vulgar" or "...otherwise objectionable". I haven't seen the page created by Barnes's ex-boyfriend soliciting strangers for sex, but it probably violated the Terms of Service in itself.

And there may be other low-hanging-fruit options that I'm not thinking of. But what if there is no easy call, because none of these simplifying factors apply? A user creates a profile on a free site claiming to be Mr. X. A third party complains that they are the real Mr. X and that the profile is fake. What should the ISP do, if they don't want to spend money verifying the real-world identities of the parties involved, every time they get a crank complaint about any users on their system?

This is essentially an economics problem. Cecilia Barnes wasn't asking Yahoo to do anything that would have been too burdensome for them -- the "labor" required to look at a faxed copy of her driver's license probably wouldn't have cost more than $5, at which point Yahoo could have initiated the process of shutting the page down, which they already have built-in procedures for. The benefit to her of getting the page shut down could have been valued in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Normally, when you need someone else to do something that costs them $5 worth of effort and brings you $1,000 worth of benefit, the natural arrangement is to pay them, but Yahoo doesn't offer this as an option.

In fact, I assume the real cost to Yahoo here would not have been actually reviewing Barnes's complaint, but actually finding it buried among all the bogus complaints that they receive, and noticing that it had real merit. Again, including a $5 payment would be one way to ensure that your complaint gets taken more seriously than all the others. But while the $5 fee might have helped in this specific situation, it's easy to imagine how that could set a bad precedent -- ISPs charging exhorbitant fees for users to submit abuse complaints to them, or users not filing complaints because they didn't want to share their payment information or pay money at all.

So, rather than paying a small fee directly, a better approach might be to require complainants to post some sort of "bond" -- which may not be something financial, as some examples will show -- in order to get their complaint to the front of the queue. Recall the example of submitting your driver's license along with an impersonation complaint. It's important to understand the subtle reason why this procedure actually works. It's not because someone couldn't still file a bogus complaint with a phony ID. (While it's somewhat hard to create a fake driver's license that you can hold in your hand, creating a fake faxed driver's license would be easy.) It's because if the complainant is lying, now they can be prosecuting for forging government documents. Essentially the complainant is posting their freedom as a "bond", going out on a limb and saying: "I can't prove to you that I'm telling the truth. But now you know that if I'm lying, I'll go to jail. Bet you the other guy won't be willing to make a binding promise like that."

So naturally I'd put that in the ISP's policy as well: If someone sends in a complaint about our user impersonating them, and they're willing to fax in a copy of their government ID proving that they are who they say they are, and we can verify that the page owner is claiming to actually be that person (and not merely complaining about that person or their business), then we would remove the page unless the account owner can submit even more compelling evidence that they are who they say they are.

This addresses the problem of the impersonation complaints that are completely fake. However, you still have the problem of what to do about people who fax in their driver's license along with letters saying "This guy is a jerk", hoping to get someone's account closed down. If a company like Yahoo is too big to read through all the complaints carefully, then it becomes hard to sort through the complaints to see which ones are really about impersonation and which ones are about other behavior that doesn't violate their TOS.

What might be a solution would be to borrow some of the non-terrible aspects of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The two most controversial provision of the DMCA are (1) a ban on software that enables the user to circumvent copyright restrictions, and (2) a requirement that ISPs have to respond to copyright-violation "takedown" notices in a certain manner. As I've said before about the DMCA, I'm opposed to #1 in principle because I think software should be protected by the First Amendment; I'm not against #2 in principle, but just concerned about how it could be abused in practice.

But one thing the DMCA does is solve the "sorting problem" -- how to get complaints about copyright violations to the top of the pile. Service provides often have a procedure for handling DMCA complaints that is separate from the regular complaint channels. The DMCA also provides protection for users against phony complaints, by stipulating that anyone who files a false complaint can be sued for statutory damages and attorney's fees, as in a case where Diebold, Inc. agreed to pay $125,000 as a penalty for sending false "takedown" notices. In other words, the DMCA solves the "bonding" problem too -- by sending a DMCA complaint, a user is effectively saying, "I agree to pay big money if I'm lying. So, I'm probably telling the truth."

So, a law addressing how ISPs should handle "impersonation" pages, modeled after the DMCA to solve the "top of the pile" problem and the "binding promise" problem, might go something like this:

• For a user to file a complaint, the complaint should cite the name of the anti-impersonation law, as in, "This complaint is being filed under the Anti-Impersonation Act of 2009". This gives ISPs an easy way to sort these complaints to the top of the pile, the same way that they have specialized channels for handling DMCA complaints.
• In the complaint, the user has to assert unambiguously that the page they are complaining about is impersonating them, and is not merely posting gripes about them or their business.
• The complaint should include a copy of a government-issued ID. (Again, this is not because this is hard to forge, but because now the complainant is promising, "If this is fake, I'll go to jail.")
• If the impersonation page is directing visitors to call a phone number or e-mail an e-mail address, and the takedown notification to the ISP includes a request to call that number or e-mail that address to verify that it doesn't actually belong to the page owner, then the ISP should follow up on that within a given time period of receiving the complaint. (And once they call that number or e-mail that address and get a response saying, "No, that page is definitely not mine", then the ISP should shut the page down.)
• Anyone who files a phony complaint citing that statute, can be held liable for statutory damages and attorney's fees, and if they faxed a phony government ID, then they can be prosecuted for that as well.

The problem-solver in me says that this is one way to ensure that legitimate complaints will be acted on, while making phony complaints much harder and riskier. It also seems to me that this is a minimal solution, in the sense that if you remove any part of it, it no longer solves the problem. For example, if you remove the part about complaints having to cite the anti-impersonation law, then you no longer have an effective means for these complaints to get to the top of the pile. And if you remove the part about civil penalties for filing phony complaints, then you no longer have any disincentive for people to tie up the system with crank complaints trying to get their enemies' accounts cancelled. Perhaps others can come up with an alternative solution that meets the logical requirements of enabling real complaints while discouraging fake ones. Meanwhile, the civil libertarian in me doesn't get a queasy feeling from it right away. It seems that it could only be used to stop cases of actual impersonation, and even as a free speech advocate I don't think that you have the moral right to impersonate someone else in a non-satirical manner for the purpose of actually deceiving or harassing people.

But even the absence of such a law is hardly an excuse for what Yahoo did. All they had to do is go to the page, look at the phone number, call the number and hear her say, "Yes, this is me and no that's not my page", and shut it down. The fact that they couldn't do this, shows a contempt for the process of handling legitimate complaints. Apart from the harm caused to Cecilia Barnes directly, incidents such as these might lead to Congress narrowing the scope of the immunity given to providers for hosting content posted by their users. Of course I'm technically suggesting a law that would narrow the scope of that immunity too, but only in a very narrowly prescribed way. If, on the other hand, Congress or the courts ever adopt the vague principle that providers can be held "jointly responsible" for whatever their users say once they've been "made aware" of it, it's going to get a lot harder for people to find Web hosting who have anything controversial to say.

The IP address and domain name do not directly identify the sender, but if the IP address or domain name is acquired from a registering organization, a database search of the address or domain name can eventually lead to the contact information on file with the registration organizations. A sender's IP address or domain name which is not registered will not prevent the transmission of the e-mail; however, the identity of the sender may not be discoverable through a database search and use of registration contact information.

These are statements that are only true if you play some kind of parlor game to find a way to read them as "true," not statements that indicate the court knew what was going on. To review: IP addresses in the U.S. are generally allocated by ARIN in blocks to Internet service providers and Web hosting companies; these companies then lease the IP addresses to their customers. You can look up an IP address with ARIN to determine which ISP or hosting company has been assigned that particular block, but the ISP or hosting company generally won't tell you the identity of their customer who has leased it from them. And anybody can register a domain, but most domain registrars give you the option of registering the domain anonymously, so that only the registrar knows the owner's true identity. So the court's statement that a database search "can eventually lead" to contact information is correct only if you clarify that it "can" lead there, but it usually won't. As a finding of fact, this is 100% true, and about as useful as "Obama might win in November. Or he might not."

But it's impossible to defend what the court says next:

As shown by the record, because e-mail transmission protocol requires entry of an IP address and domain name for the sender, the only way such a speaker can publish an anonymous e-mail is to enter a false IP address or domain name. Therefore ... registered IP addresses and domain names discoverable through searchable data bases and registration documents "necessarily result[] in a surrender of [the speaker's] anonymity."

Now, there are two possible definitions of "anonymity" to consider: (1) you can be anonymous to the extent that ordinary citizens reading your content cannot determine your identity without a subpoena; or (2) you can be anonymous to the extent that even the government, armed with subpoenas and wiretaps, can never find out who you are. But under either interpretation of the word, the court's statement that "the only way such a speaker can publish an anonymous e-mail is to enter a false IP address or domain name," is wrong.

By default, almost all Internet users are already anonymous in the first sense, even without using forged headers or other tricks in their e-mails. When you send e-mail through your own Internet service provider's mail server, or when you log on to Hotmail and send messages from a Hotmail account, or when you lease a dedicated server from a Web hosting company and use it to send mails, the messages don't contain any more information about your true identity than you decide to put in them. Only the government could ordinarily discover your identity in those cases, by looking at the IP address that the message was sent from, and subpoenaing the Internet service provider or hosting company for the identity of the person using that IP address at that time.

But there are even ways to be anonymous in the second sense -- such that not even the government could identify you -- without resorting to forged e-mail headers. You can create Hotmail and Gmail accounts without giving the providers any of your true information. When you send messages through those services, they pass along the IP address that you used to connect to their Web sites, but you can obscure your IP address as well, by using an anonymizing proxy or a service like Tor.

Elsewhere in their decision, the court indicated that what they really wanted to protect was the right to send anonymous bulk e-mails that were political or otherwise non-commercial. But even by that standard, it's still possible to use Hotmail and Gmail together with an anonymizing proxy (the mail services do impose limits on how many messages each account can send in a day, but if you want to send bulk mails badly enough, you can always sign up for multiple accounts). And if you only care about staying beyond the reach of U.S. subpoena power, you can always sign up for a dedicated host overseas and send the bulk mails from there.

Apart from the court's misstatement that forged headers are the only way to publish anonymously in e-mail, there is the incorrect presumption that forged headers actually do afford anonymity in either of the senses given above. The court wrote, "[T]he only way such a speaker can publish an anonymous e-mail is to enter a false IP address or domain name." But while it is possible to enter any domain you want in your return e-mail address when you send an e-mail, the court apparently didn't know what it was talking about when it referred to "entering a false IP address." You can't just "enter" any arbitrary IP address when sending an e-mail. If user@domain name.com receives an e-mail, the mail server at domain name.com has to receive the message over a connection made from some other machine, and the domain name.com mail server can always see the IP address of the machine on the other end of the connection. Normally, this machine on the other end would be the mail server of the sender's Internet service provider. Or if the sender has leased a dedicated machine at a hosting company, that dedicated machine would be the one connecting to the domain name.com mail server. Some desktop spamming programs let you turn your home computer into the sending mail server, so that it connects directly with the remote mail server to send the message. In all of these cases, the receiving mail server can see the IP address of the sending machine, so a government subpoena would usually be enough to determine the sender's identity. (I know you all know this, but I have delusions that some helpful clerk will print out this article and explain this to the judge.)

When spammers "enter" false IP addresses in sending mails, that usually means entering made-up IP addresses in headers that are sent along with the contents of the message. However, these would normally only have the effect of throwing someone off the trail who opened the message sent to user@domain name.com and was reading the headers manually. Perhaps they would see some random IP addresses scattered in the headers, would go to ARIN and look up the hosting company or ISP that those IP addresses were assigned to, and would mistakenly file a complaint with that company. But the domain name.com server can always see the true IP address that the message was received from, and for people who know how to read the headers properly, that IP address will be indicated in the headers as the address that connected to the domain name.com mail server to send the mail.

So the court's statement that "the only way such a speaker can publish an anonymous e-mail is to enter a false IP address or domain name" is doubly wrong: because it's easy to send e-mails anonymously without using forged headers, and because forged headers do not in fact provide the level of anonymity that the court said should be protected anyway. The only way to truly obscure your identity by hijacking a third-party IP address without permission, would be to hack into a third party's computer, by infecting a user's home computer with a Trojan horse for example, and using it to send mail. Presumably the court was not contemplating that such an activity should be considered legal, even as a means of sending political speech.

It would presumably be unconstitutional for an anti-spam law to prohibit anonymous political e-mails which attempted to hide the sender's identity -- that is after all what "anonymous" means! You couldn't pass a law outlawing Tor, for example. But the Virginia law doesn't apply to senders merely trying to hide their identity, it applies only to the use of computers "to falsify or forge electronic mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail" (emphasis added). There is a difference between obscuring one's identity (which Tor and anonymous remailers allow you to do), and actively trying to frame an existing third party by using forged headers to make the mail appear that it came from somewhere else, especially when sending bulk mail, which is likely to generate complaints whether it's commercial or not.

By contrast, the Washington anti-spam law prohibits any mail which "misrepresents or obscures" the origin of the message (emphasis added). This is broader and could be construed to include a wider range of things, such as the use of overseas IP addresses to send bulk mail on behalf of a U.S. company, or the use of anonymously registered domains to hide the sender's identity. It would probably be unconstitutional to prohibit these obscuring techniques for non-commercial anonymous e-mail, which is why the Washington law specifically applies only to commercial messages.

But here I'm getting into issues like constitutional law where different experts might disagree. The clear-cut technical fact is that, contrary to the court's ruling, forged e-mail headers do not provide true anonymity when sending mail, whereas there are other, legal, ways of sending mail that do make the sender truly anonymous.

What is frustrating about the court's misstatements about IP addresses, domain names, and anonymity, is that the judge is obviously intelligent and could have understood the concepts if they had been explained correctly to him. I held some misconceptions for a long time myself about domain names and IP addresses, because the first explanations I read were incomplete or wrong, or I didn't understand them. But the mistakes in the ruling would have been caught if the judge had just showed a draft to an Internet guru and said, "Hey, can you check if there's anything wrong here?" I know, I know, that's "just not done" (and there are probably formal rules in most states against showing a draft of a ruling to a third party before publishing it, even if the third party reviewer is sworn to secrecy, as they should be). But there's nothing stopping the judge from asking a technical expert during the trial, "It seems to me that the only way to publish anonymously on the Internet would be to use forged headers in e-mail. Can you tell me if that's right before I go too far down that line of reasoning?"

I've appeared before judges in Small Claims court who did ask questions about any part of the technical issues that they wanted to understand, and were even willing to revise some prior misconceptions. But all of them, even the open-minded ones, proceed by gathering information during the trial, and then in the conclusion, spell out their argument and their ruling (during which time you're not allowed to interrupt), which is then set in stone unless you appeal. I've never seen a judge say, "Here's the line of reasoning in my head right now, and my tentative conclusion. Is there anything in that chain of reasoning that you want to dispute, before I make it final? I am not promising to change my mind just because you disagree with something. But I will take it into account." This is essentially what scientists do when they submit their papers for peer review before publishing them, to minimize the chance of making an error. Judges could do the same thing -- if not formally, because they're not allowed to show opinions to third parties, then at least informally, by running their ideas past the experts assembled in their courtroom -- to reduce the chance of making a mistake. But have you ever heard of a judge doing that?

The Virginia judges probably did about as well as one could be expected to do, having learned all these technical terms only recently, and then withdrawing to their chambers to form an argument without any feedback from any technical experts. So, given the technical howlers that ended up in the ruling, the moral is that forming an argument in isolation from experts is probably not the right way to go about it.

Apart from the politics of minors' free speech rights in general, I think there are at least three logical problems with the ruling. The first is the judge's argument that even though on-campus speech and off-campus speech are separate, if the off-campus speech is offensive enough, that elevates it to the point of giving the school jurisdiction over it. The second is the judge's comparison between a student's parody MySpace page, and the mock-threatening rap lyrics that got a student expelled in another court case -- a court ruled that the school overstepped their bounds by expelling the student for the rap song, but Judge Munley said that a MySpace page jokingly calling the principal a "sex addict" was actually more offensive than the violent rap lyrics. The third is the argument that because the student's conduct was so offensive that it could have theoretically been criminally punished if the principal took her to court, that made it acceptable for the school to take the easier route of suspending her.

All right, all together now: I'm not a lawyer, and probably neither are you. But as I've said before, if you put 10 judges in 10 separate rooms and asked them to decide this case (or any other case) independently of each other, you'd be very unlikely to get a consensus anyway. The importance of courts in a civilized society is that they provide a peaceful means of settling disputes, not because we expect that the judges will actually get the "right" answer -- that's why we don't have a crisis of faith in the system every time the Supreme Court splits 5-4. (By contrast, when physicists work on problems involving car safety and satellite trajectories, we do care about them getting the "right" answer, and so physicists are held to a higher standard than judges -- we expect that 9 physicists working on the same problem in separate rooms would all get the same result.) That goes for the rest of us too -- I have no independent confirmation that I'm right, and anyone ranting with supreme confidence that I'm wrong, has no independent confirmation that they're right, either. The best we can do is try to make arguments that are logically consistent, and check that even if they are free of internal contradicions, that they also can't be carried through to an absurd conclusion.

To wit: Judge Munley's decision cites four prior cases that involved students making offensive or disruptive speech (although still not as offensive as the MySpace page in this case calling the principal a pedophile) while on school property or at school events: Bethel School Dist v. Fraser, Hazlewood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, Morse v. Frederick, and Klein v. Smith. In those cases, the courts ruled that the discipline did not violate the students' rights because the students were at school events or on campus when they made the statements at issue. Judge Munley then cites another list of cases in which students published speech that was generally more offensive than the incidents in the first list, but did it on their own time, away from school: Flaherty v. Keystone Oaks Sch. Dist., Latour v. Riverside Beaver Sch. Dist., Killion v. Franklin Regaional Sch. Dist., and Layshock v. Hermitage Sch. Dist. In all of these cases, the courts ruled that the school districts violated the students' rights by punishing them for off-campus speech. So far, all eight of these cases cited by Munley, followed the rule: on-campus or school-affiliated speech is punishable, off-campus speech is not. (Munley cites only one case that was an exception to this rule: Fenton v. Stear, in which the court upheld the punishment of a student who was off campus when he loudly referred to a teacher as a "prick.")

But then, Judge Munley argues more or less that the speech in this case is so offensive (calling the principal a sex addict and a pedophile), that you're allowed to lift it out of the category of off-campus speech and treat it by analogy to earlier cases involving on-campus speech. Munley wrote:

In the instant case, there can be no doubt that the speech used is vulgar and lewd. The profile contains words such as "fucking," "bitch," "fagass," "dick," "tight ass," and "dick head." The speech does not make any type of political statement. It is merely an attack on the school's principal. It makes him out to be a pedophile and sex addict. This speech is not the Tinker silent political protest. It is more akin to the lewd and vulgar speech addressed in Fraser. It is also akin to the speech that promoted illegal actions in the Morse case.

The content itself is "akin" to the offensive speech in the earlier cases, but what difference does that make, if the speech didn't take place in school? Getting back to first principles: Why does the First Amendment generally grant the freedom to call people "dick" and "tight ass"? Because it doesn't hurt anyone except to the extent that it hurts their feelings, and you don't have a right to unhurt feelings. Because the remarks can be made in the context of general legitimate criticism of someone, which might motivate them to change the behavior that led someone to call them a "tight ass" in the first place. Once these premises are accepted, it doesn't matter if you ratchet up the offensiveness from calling someone a "dick" to calling them a "fucking dick." It does change the analysis if you move the speech to a different setting, e.g. standing up in class when people are trying to learn, and shouting that the principal is a "fucking dick." But that's not what this student was doing.

After all, if the regulation of off-campus speech were justified in order to prevent harm or embarrassment to the principal, carry that through to its logical conclusion: Suppose a former student, who had since graduated, created the parody MySpace page and e-mailed it to friends at the school. The school's "interest" in preserving order and protecting the principal's reputation, would be exactly the same -- and yet no court has ever suggested that the government can punish a former student for speech outside of school (unless the speech rises to the level of threats or libel, which anyone can be punished for, regardless of the former student-principal relationship). To be punished, the former student would have to bring the speech into the school, where it could cause a disruption (and where, as a non-student, they could be banned from the premises anyway).

As for the second problem, apart from the issue of whether offensiveness alone is enough to give the school the right to punish a student for off-campus speech, there is the question of what criteria Judge Munley used to determine that the MySpace page was more offensive than the student off-campus speech in previous cases. In Latour v. Riverside Beaver Sch. Dist. , the court found that a student's rap lyrics which made mock threats toward another student, identified by name, could not be treated as a true threat because they were the kind of boastful posturing that rappers are known for (apparently including the ones in junior high school these days). Similarly, the MySpace page created in this case, began with the words:

yes. It's your oh so wonderful, hairy,
expressionless, sex addict, fagass, put on this world
with a small dick PRINCIPAL

and hopefully the principal would agree that any reasonable reader would know this was not written by him. So if the content of the speech in both cases was clearly not meant to be taken seriously, a fair apples-to-apples comparison would be to ask which is the more offensive topic: violence, or a joke about a principal listing among his "interests": "detention, being a tight ass, riding the fraintrain, spending time with my child (who looks like a gorilla), baseball, my golden pen, fucking in my office, hitting on students and their parents"?

What Judge Munley seems to be saying is that joking about murder is more acceptable than joking about a principal hitting on students. While I think this is absurd and offensive to victims of violence, I have to admit that this is at least consistent with standards of censorship in the U.S. It's a tired old complaint, but it's never been satisfactorily answered: Why can you show a character being killed on television, but a sex act is taboo? Why are the most offensive swear words derived from sex acts and sex organs, but there are no equivalent words for murder that are banned from the airwaves? What's worse?

Third, the judge seemed to adopt the position that because the student could theoretically have been prosecuted for creating the fake MySpace profile, that made it acceptable for the school to impose a milder punishment that circumvented the court system. Judge Munley wrote:

The speech at issue here could have been the basis for criminal charges against J.S. Additionally, the state police indicated to McGonigle that he could press harassment charges based upon the imposter profile. (Dep. McG, 98- 99). McGonigle indicated that he would not press charges, but asked the police officer to contact the students involved and their parents to inform them of the seriousness of the situation. (Dep. McG at 99, 163-64). The officer summoned the students and their parents to the state police station and discussed the seriousness of the profile and that McGonigle would not press charges.

It's at least debatable whether the MySpace page, which was an obvious parody, could have been the basis for criminal charges. But suppose we grant the judge that point. In that case, even if we know that someone's actions would have gotten them a more severe punishment from the courts, is it acceptable to give them a lighter punishment for something else, just because that's simpler for the school?

No. First, because it fosters disrespect for the rule of law in general: If you committed X, then you should be punished for X, according to the rules set up for punishing X. When Judge Jackie Glass began O.J. Simpson's trial this month for robbing two men at gunpoint, she told jurors: "If you think you are going to punish Mr Simpson for what happened in 1995, this is not the case for you." She, like most sentient beings, probably believed privately that O.J. committed the murders in 1994, but she knew the rule of law was more important than the outcome of any one case, even a murder trial. Second, lighter punishments (such as a suspension from school) often come with a lower standard of judicial review, so you could end up getting an undeserved punishment, in cases where a proper trial for the actual crime at issue might have found that you should not have been punished at all. (Al Capone did get put away for tax evasion, but the court found that he was in fact guilty of tax evasion -- they weren't reaching that as a compromise to avoid trying him for his crimes as a gangster.)

To come clean, however, I have to admit that I have tried to egg judges down that route occasionally. I've taken spammers to court and gotten them to say, under oath, that they never sent any spam and didn't know what I was talking about, before I revealed a tape-recording of a conversation (recorded legally) in which they offered to send 5 million pieces of spam for $500, that the spams were routed out through a server in China to help defeat spam filters, etc. The idea was that the judge would get pissed at the spammer for committing perjury, but realize that it would be too much paperwork to prosecute that, so just bang them over the head with a thousand-dollar judgment for spamming, which would go to me. Unfortunately this can backfire if the judge is so opposed to anti-spam suits that no amount of evidence will convince them anyway. But even if it had worked, it would not be strictly correct to say that justice had been done -- perjury should be punished as perjury, even if only with a slap on the wrist.

So, I'm sure that Judge Munley was trying in his own way to do the right thing by preserving order in the school system, but he probably decided in advance what conclusion to reach, and came up with the arguments after the fact. Still, it may not be a loss for student rights in the long run. The ACLU, which represented the student, has not said whether they will appeal, and anyway, virtually all other caselaw so far has said that student speech off campus is protected, as Judge Munley himself pointed out.

Apart from the politics of minors' free speech rights in general, I think there are at least three logical problems with the ruling. The first is the judge's argument that even though on-campus speech and off-campus speech are separate, if the off-campus speech is offensive enough, that elevates it to the point of giving the school jurisdiction over it. The second is the judge's comparison between a student's parody MySpace page, and the mock-threatening rap lyrics that got a student expelled in another court case -- a court ruled that the school overstepped their bounds by expelling the student for the rap song, but Judge Munley said that a MySpace page jokingly calling the principal a "sex addict" was actually more offensive than the violent rap lyrics. The third is the argument that because the student's conduct was so offensive that it could have theoretically been criminally punished if the principal took her to court, that made it acceptable for the school to take the easier route of suspending her.

All right, all together now: I'm not a lawyer, and probably neither are you. But as I've said before, if you put 10 judges in 10 separate rooms and asked them to decide this case (or any other case) independently of each other, you'd be very unlikely to get a consensus anyway. The importance of courts in a civilized society is that they provide a peaceful means of settling disputes, not because we expect that the judges will actually get the "right" answer -- that's why we don't have a crisis of faith in the system every time the Supreme Court splits 5-4. (By contrast, when physicists work on problems involving car safety and satellite trajectories, we do care about them getting the "right" answer, and so physicists are held to a higher standard than judges -- we expect that 9 physicists working on the same problem in separate rooms would all get the same result.) That goes for the rest of us too -- I have no independent confirmation that I'm right, and anyone ranting with supreme confidence that I'm wrong, has no independent confirmation that they're right, either. The best we can do is try to make arguments that are logically consistent, and check that even if they are free of internal contradicions, that they also can't be carried through to an absurd conclusion.

To wit: Judge Munley's decision cites four prior cases that involved students making offensive or disruptive speech (although still not as offensive as the MySpace page in this case calling the principal a pedophile) while on school property or at school events: Bethel School Dist v. Fraser, Hazlewood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, Morse v. Frederick, and Klein v. Smith. In those cases, the courts ruled that the discipline did not violate the students' rights because the students were at school events or on campus when they made the statements at issue. Judge Munley then cites another list of cases in which students published speech that was generally more offensive than the incidents in the first list, but did it on their own time, away from school: Flaherty v. Keystone Oaks Sch. Dist., Latour v. Riverside Beaver Sch. Dist., Killion v. Franklin Regaional Sch. Dist., and Layshock v. Hermitage Sch. Dist. In all of these cases, the courts ruled that the school districts violated the students' rights by punishing them for off-campus speech. So far, all eight of these cases cited by Munley, followed the rule: on-campus or school-affiliated speech is punishable, off-campus speech is not. (Munley cites only one case that was an exception to this rule: Fenton v. Stear, in which the court upheld the punishment of a student who was off campus when he loudly referred to a teacher as a "prick.")

But then, Judge Munley argues more or less that the speech in this case is so offensive (calling the principal a sex addict and a pedophile), that you're allowed to lift it out of the category of off-campus speech and treat it by analogy to earlier cases involving on-campus speech. Munley wrote:

In the instant case, there can be no doubt that the speech used is vulgar and lewd. The profile contains words such as "fucking," "bitch," "fagass," "dick," "tight ass," and "dick head." The speech does not make any type of political statement. It is merely an attack on the school's principal. It makes him out to be a pedophile and sex addict. This speech is not the Tinker silent political protest. It is more akin to the lewd and vulgar speech addressed in Fraser. It is also akin to the speech that promoted illegal actions in the Morse case.

The content itself is "akin" to the offensive speech in the earlier cases, but what difference does that make, if the speech didn't take place in school? Getting back to first principles: Why does the First Amendment generally grant the freedom to call people "dick" and "tight ass"? Because it doesn't hurt anyone except to the extent that it hurts their feelings, and you don't have a right to unhurt feelings. Because the remarks can be made in the context of general legitimate criticism of someone, which might motivate them to change the behavior that led someone to call them a "tight ass" in the first place. Once these premises are accepted, it doesn't matter if you ratchet up the offensiveness from calling someone a "dick" to calling them a "fucking dick." It does change the analysis if you move the speech to a different setting, e.g. standing up in class when people are trying to learn, and shouting that the principal is a "fucking dick." But that's not what this student was doing.

After all, if the regulation of off-campus speech were justified in order to prevent harm or embarrassment to the principal, carry that through to its logical conclusion: Suppose a former student, who had since graduated, created the parody MySpace page and e-mailed it to friends at the school. The school's "interest" in preserving order and protecting the principal's reputation, would be exactly the same -- and yet no court has ever suggested that the government can punish a former student for speech outside of school (unless the speech rises to the level of threats or libel, which anyone can be punished for, regardless of the former student-principal relationship). To be punished, the former student would have to bring the speech into the school, where it could cause a disruption (and where, as a non-student, they could be banned from the premises anyway).

As for the second problem, apart from the issue of whether offensiveness alone is enough to give the school the right to punish a student for off-campus speech, there is the question of what criteria Judge Munley used to determine that the MySpace page was more offensive than the student off-campus speech in previous cases. In Latour v. Riverside Beaver Sch. Dist. , the court found that a student's rap lyrics which made mock threats toward another student, identified by name, could not be treated as a true threat because they were the kind of boastful posturing that rappers are known for (apparently including the ones in junior high school these days). Similarly, the MySpace page created in this case, began with the words:

yes. It's your oh so wonderful, hairy,
expressionless, sex addict, fagass, put on this world
with a small dick PRINCIPAL

and hopefully the principal would agree that any reasonable reader would know this was not written by him. So if the content of the speech in both cases was clearly not meant to be taken seriously, a fair apples-to-apples comparison would be to ask which is the more offensive topic: violence, or a joke about a principal listing among his "interests": "detention, being a tight ass, riding the fraintrain, spending time with my child (who looks like a gorilla), baseball, my golden pen, fucking in my office, hitting on students and their parents"?

What Judge Munley seems to be saying is that joking about murder is more acceptable than joking about a principal hitting on students. While I think this is absurd and offensive to victims of violence, I have to admit that this is at least consistent with standards of censorship in the U.S. It's a tired old complaint, but it's never been satisfactorily answered: Why can you show a character being killed on television, but a sex act is taboo? Why are the most offensive swear words derived from sex acts and sex organs, but there are no equivalent words for murder that are banned from the airwaves? What's worse?

Third, the judge seemed to adopt the position that because the student could theoretically have been prosecuted for creating the fake MySpace profile, that made it acceptable for the school to impose a milder punishment that circumvented the court system. Judge Munley wrote:

The speech at issue here could have been the basis for criminal charges against J.S. Additionally, the state police indicated to McGonigle that he could press harassment charges based upon the imposter profile. (Dep. McG, 98- 99). McGonigle indicated that he would not press charges, but asked the police officer to contact the students involved and their parents to inform them of the seriousness of the situation. (Dep. McG at 99, 163-64). The officer summoned the students and their parents to the state police station and discussed the seriousness of the profile and that McGonigle would not press charges.

It's at least debatable whether the MySpace page, which was an obvious parody, could have been the basis for criminal charges. But suppose we grant the judge that point. In that case, even if we know that someone's actions would have gotten them a more severe punishment from the courts, is it acceptable to give them a lighter punishment for something else, just because that's simpler for the school?

No. First, because it fosters disrespect for the rule of law in general: If you committed X, then you should be punished for X, according to the rules set up for punishing X. When Judge Jackie Glass began O.J. Simpson's trial this month for robbing two men at gunpoint, she told jurors: "If you think you are going to punish Mr Simpson for what happened in 1995, this is not the case for you." She, like most sentient beings, probably believed privately that O.J. committed the murders in 1994, but she knew the rule of law was more important than the outcome of any one case, even a murder trial. Second, lighter punishments (such as a suspension from school) often come with a lower standard of judicial review, so you could end up getting an undeserved punishment, in cases where a proper trial for the actual crime at issue might have found that you should not have been punished at all. (Al Capone did get put away for tax evasion, but the court found that he was in fact guilty of tax evasion -- they weren't reaching that as a compromise to avoid trying him for his crimes as a gangster.)

To come clean, however, I have to admit that I have tried to egg judges down that route occasionally. I've taken spammers to court and gotten them to say, under oath, that they never sent any spam and didn't know what I was talking about, before I revealed a tape-recording of a conversation (recorded legally) in which they offered to send 5 million pieces of spam for $500, that the spams were routed out through a server in China to help defeat spam filters, etc. The idea was that the judge would get pissed at the spammer for committing perjury, but realize that it would be too much paperwork to prosecute that, so just bang them over the head with a thousand-dollar judgment for spamming, which would go to me. Unfortunately this can backfire if the judge is so opposed to anti-spam suits that no amount of evidence will convince them anyway. But even if it had worked, it would not be strictly correct to say that justice had been done -- perjury should be punished as perjury, even if only with a slap on the wrist.

So, I'm sure that Judge Munley was trying in his own way to do the right thing by preserving order in the school system, but he probably decided in advance what conclusion to reach, and came up with the arguments after the fact. Still, it may not be a loss for student rights in the long run. The ACLU, which represented the student, has not said whether they will appeal, and anyway, virtually all other caselaw so far has said that student speech off campus is protected, as Judge Munley himself pointed out.

Apart from the politics of minors' free speech rights in general, I think there are at least three logical problems with the ruling. The first is the judge's argument that even though on-campus speech and off-campus speech are separate, if the off-campus speech is offensive enough, that elevates it to the point of giving the school jurisdiction over it. The second is the judge's comparison between a student's parody MySpace page, and the mock-threatening rap lyrics that got a student expelled in another court case -- a court ruled that the school overstepped their bounds by expelling the student for the rap song, but Judge Munley said that a MySpace page jokingly calling the principal a "sex addict" was actually more offensive than the violent rap lyrics. The third is the argument that because the student's conduct was so offensive that it could have theoretically been criminally punished if the principal took her to court, that made it acceptable for the school to take the easier route of suspending her.

All right, all together now: I'm not a lawyer, and probably neither are you. But as I've said before, if you put 10 judges in 10 separate rooms and asked them to decide this case (or any other case) independently of each other, you'd be very unlikely to get a consensus anyway. The importance of courts in a civilized society is that they provide a peaceful means of settling disputes, not because we expect that the judges will actually get the "right" answer -- that's why we don't have a crisis of faith in the system every time the Supreme Court splits 5-4. (By contrast, when physicists work on problems involving car safety and satellite trajectories, we do care about them getting the "right" answer, and so physicists are held to a higher standard than judges -- we expect that 9 physicists working on the same problem in separate rooms would all get the same result.) That goes for the rest of us too -- I have no independent confirmation that I'm right, and anyone ranting with supreme confidence that I'm wrong, has no independent confirmation that they're right, either. The best we can do is try to make arguments that are logically consistent, and check that even if they are free of internal contradicions, that they also can't be carried through to an absurd conclusion.

To wit: Judge Munley's decision cites four prior cases that involved students making offensive or disruptive speech (although still not as offensive as the MySpace page in this case calling the principal a pedophile) while on school property or at school events: Bethel School Dist v. Fraser, Hazlewood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, Morse v. Frederick, and Klein v. Smith. In those cases, the courts ruled that the discipline did not violate the students' rights because the students were at school events or on campus when they made the statements at issue. Judge Munley then cites another list of cases in which students published speech that was generally more offensive than the incidents in the first list, but did it on their own time, away from school: Flaherty v. Keystone Oaks Sch. Dist., Latour v. Riverside Beaver Sch. Dist., Killion v. Franklin Regaional Sch. Dist., and Layshock v. Hermitage Sch. Dist. In all of these cases, the courts ruled that the school districts violated the students' rights by punishing them for off-campus speech. So far, all eight of these cases cited by Munley, followed the rule: on-campus or school-affiliated speech is punishable, off-campus speech is not. (Munley cites only one case that was an exception to this rule: Fenton v. Stear, in which the court upheld the punishment of a student who was off campus when he loudly referred to a teacher as a "prick.")

But then, Judge Munley argues more or less that the speech in this case is so offensive (calling the principal a sex addict and a pedophile), that you're allowed to lift it out of the category of off-campus speech and treat it by analogy to earlier cases involving on-campus speech. Munley wrote:

In the instant case, there can be no doubt that the speech used is vulgar and lewd. The profile contains words such as "fucking," "bitch," "fagass," "dick," "tight ass," and "dick head." The speech does not make any type of political statement. It is merely an attack on the school's principal. It makes him out to be a pedophile and sex addict. This speech is not the Tinker silent political protest. It is more akin to the lewd and vulgar speech addressed in Fraser. It is also akin to the speech that promoted illegal actions in the Morse case.

The content itself is "akin" to the offensive speech in the earlier cases, but what difference does that make, if the speech didn't take place in school? Getting back to first principles: Why does the First Amendment generally grant the freedom to call people "dick" and "tight ass"? Because it doesn't hurt anyone except to the extent that it hurts their feelings, and you don't have a right to unhurt feelings. Because the remarks can be made in the context of general legitimate criticism of someone, which might motivate them to change the behavior that led someone to call them a "tight ass" in the first place. Once these premises are accepted, it doesn't matter if you ratchet up the offensiveness from calling someone a "dick" to calling them a "fucking dick." It does change the analysis if you move the speech to a different setting, e.g. standing up in class when people are trying to learn, and shouting that the principal is a "fucking dick." But that's not what this student was doing.

After all, if the regulation of off-campus speech were justified in order to prevent harm or embarrassment to the principal, carry that through to its logical conclusion: Suppose a former student, who had since graduated, created the parody MySpace page and e-mailed it to friends at the school. The school's "interest" in preserving order and protecting the principal's reputation, would be exactly the same -- and yet no court has ever suggested that the government can punish a former student for speech outside of school (unless the speech rises to the level of threats or libel, which anyone can be punished for, regardless of the former student-principal relationship). To be punished, the former student would have to bring the speech into the school, where it could cause a disruption (and where, as a non-student, they could be banned from the premises anyway).

As for the second problem, apart from the issue of whether offensiveness alone is enough to give the school the right to punish a student for off-campus speech, there is the question of what criteria Judge Munley used to determine that the MySpace page was more offensive than the student off-campus speech in previous cases. In Latour v. Riverside Beaver Sch. Dist. , the court found that a student's rap lyrics which made mock threats toward another student, identified by name, could not be treated as a true threat because they were the kind of boastful posturing that rappers are known for (apparently including the ones in junior high school these days). Similarly, the MySpace page created in this case, began with the words:

yes. It's your oh so wonderful, hairy,
expressionless, sex addict, fagass, put on this world
with a small dick PRINCIPAL

and hopefully the principal would agree that any reasonable reader would know this was not written by him. So if the content of the speech in both cases was clearly not meant to be taken seriously, a fair apples-to-apples comparison would be to ask which is the more offensive topic: violence, or a joke about a principal listing among his "interests": "detention, being a tight ass, riding the fraintrain, spending time with my child (who looks like a gorilla), baseball, my golden pen, fucking in my office, hitting on students and their parents"?

What Judge Munley seems to be saying is that joking about murder is more acceptable than joking about a principal hitting on students. While I think this is absurd and offensive to victims of violence, I have to admit that this is at least consistent with standards of censorship in the U.S. It's a tired old complaint, but it's never been satisfactorily answered: Why can you show a character being killed on television, but a sex act is taboo? Why are the most offensive swear words derived from sex acts and sex organs, but there are no equivalent words for murder that are banned from the airwaves? What's worse?

Third, the judge seemed to adopt the position that because the student could theoretically have been prosecuted for creating the fake MySpace profile, that made it acceptable for the school to impose a milder punishment that circumvented the court system. Judge Munley wrote:

The speech at issue here could have been the basis for criminal charges against J.S. Additionally, the state police indicated to McGonigle that he could press harassment charges based upon the imposter profile. (Dep. McG, 98- 99). McGonigle indicated that he would not press charges, but asked the police officer to contact the students involved and their parents to inform them of the seriousness of the situation. (Dep. McG at 99, 163-64). The officer summoned the students and their parents to the state police station and discussed the seriousness of the profile and that McGonigle would not press charges.

It's at least debatable whether the MySpace page, which was an obvious parody, could have been the basis for criminal charges. But suppose we grant the judge that point. In that case, even if we know that someone's actions would have gotten them a more severe punishment from the courts, is it acceptable to give them a lighter punishment for something else, just because that's simpler for the school?

No. First, because it fosters disrespect for the rule of law in general: If you committed X, then you should be punished for X, according to the rules set up for punishing X. When Judge Jackie Glass began O.J. Simpson's trial this month for robbing two men at gunpoint, she told jurors: "If you think you are going to punish Mr Simpson for what happened in 1995, this is not the case for you." She, like most sentient beings, probably believed privately that O.J. committed the murders in 1994, but she knew the rule of law was more important than the outcome of any one case, even a murder trial. Second, lighter punishments (such as a suspension from school) often come with a lower standard of judicial review, so you could end up getting an undeserved punishment, in cases where a proper trial for the actual crime at issue might have found that you should not have been punished at all. (Al Capone did get put away for tax evasion, but the court found that he was in fact guilty of tax evasion -- they weren't reaching that as a compromise to avoid trying him for his crimes as a gangster.)

To come clean, however, I have to admit that I have tried to egg judges down that route occasionally. I've taken spammers to court and gotten them to say, under oath, that they never sent any spam and didn't know what I was talking about, before I revealed a tape-recording of a conversation (recorded legally) in which they offered to send 5 million pieces of spam for $500, that the spams were routed out through a server in China to help defeat spam filters, etc. The idea was that the judge would get pissed at the spammer for committing perjury, but realize that it would be too much paperwork to prosecute that, so just bang them over the head with a thousand-dollar judgment for spamming, which would go to me. Unfortunately this can backfire if the judge is so opposed to anti-spam suits that no amount of evidence will convince them anyway. But even if it had worked, it would not be strictly correct to say that justice had been done -- perjury should be punished as perjury, even if only with a slap on the wrist.

So, I'm sure that Judge Munley was trying in his own way to do the right thing by preserving order in the school system, but he probably decided in advance what conclusion to reach, and came up with the arguments after the fact. Still, it may not be a loss for student rights in the long run. The ACLU, which represented the student, has not said whether they will appeal, and anyway, virtually all other caselaw so far has said that student speech off campus is protected, as Judge Munley himself pointed out.

Apart from the politics of minors' free speech rights in general, I think there are at least three logical problems with the ruling. The first is the judge's argument that even though on-campus speech and off-campus speech are separate, if the off-campus speech is offensive enough, that elevates it to the point of giving the school jurisdiction over it. The second is the judge's comparison between a student's parody MySpace page, and the mock-threatening rap lyrics that got a student expelled in another court case -- a court ruled that the school overstepped their bounds by expelling the student for the rap song, but Judge Munley said that a MySpace page jokingly calling the principal a "sex addict" was actually more offensive than the violent rap lyrics. The third is the argument that because the student's conduct was so offensive that it could have theoretically been criminally punished if the principal took her to court, that made it acceptable for the school to take the easier route of suspending her.

All right, all together now: I'm not a lawyer, and probably neither are you. But as I've said before, if you put 10 judges in 10 separate rooms and asked them to decide this case (or any other case) independently of each other, you'd be very unlikely to get a consensus anyway. The importance of courts in a civilized society is that they provide a peaceful means of settling disputes, not because we expect that the judges will actually get the "right" answer -- that's why we don't have a crisis of faith in the system every time the Supreme Court splits 5-4. (By contrast, when physicists work on problems involving car safety and satellite trajectories, we do care about them getting the "right" answer, and so physicists are held to a higher standard than judges -- we expect that 9 physicists working on the same problem in separate rooms would all get the same result.) That goes for the rest of us too -- I have no independent confirmation that I'm right, and anyone ranting with supreme confidence that I'm wrong, has no independent confirmation that they're right, either. The best we can do is try to make arguments that are logically consistent, and check that even if they are free of internal contradicions, that they also can't be carried through to an absurd conclusion.

To wit: Judge Munley's decision cites four prior cases that involved students making offensive or disruptive speech (although still not as offensive as the MySpace page in this case calling the principal a pedophile) while on school property or at school events: Bethel School Dist v. Fraser, Hazlewood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, Morse v. Frederick, and Klein v. Smith. In those cases, the courts ruled that the discipline did not violate the students' rights because the students were at school events or on campus when they made the statements at issue. Judge Munley then cites another list of cases in which students published speech that was generally more offensive than the incidents in the first list, but did it on their own time, away from school: Flaherty v. Keystone Oaks Sch. Dist., Latour v. Riverside Beaver Sch. Dist., Killion v. Franklin Regaional Sch. Dist., and Layshock v. Hermitage Sch. Dist. In all of these cases, the courts ruled that the school districts violated the students' rights by punishing them for off-campus speech. So far, all eight of these cases cited by Munley, followed the rule: on-campus or school-affiliated speech is punishable, off-campus speech is not. (Munley cites only one case that was an exception to this rule: Fenton v. Stear, in which the court upheld the punishment of a student who was off campus when he loudly referred to a teacher as a "prick.")

But then, Judge Munley argues more or less that the speech in this case is so offensive (calling the principal a sex addict and a pedophile), that you're allowed to lift it out of the category of off-campus speech and treat it by analogy to earlier cases involving on-campus speech. Munley wrote:

In the instant case, there can be no doubt that the speech used is vulgar and lewd. The profile contains words such as "fucking," "bitch," "fagass," "dick," "tight ass," and "dick head." The speech does not make any type of political statement. It is merely an attack on the school's principal. It makes him out to be a pedophile and sex addict. This speech is not the Tinker silent political protest. It is more akin to the lewd and vulgar speech addressed in Fraser. It is also akin to the speech that promoted illegal actions in the Morse case.

The content itself is "akin" to the offensive speech in the earlier cases, but what difference does that make, if the speech didn't take place in school? Getting back to first principles: Why does the First Amendment generally grant the freedom to call people "dick" and "tight ass"? Because it doesn't hurt anyone except to the extent that it hurts their feelings, and you don't have a right to unhurt feelings. Because the remarks can be made in the context of general legitimate criticism of someone, which might motivate them to change the behavior that led someone to call them a "tight ass" in the first place. Once these premises are accepted, it doesn't matter if you ratchet up the offensiveness from calling someone a "dick" to calling them a "fucking dick." It does change the analysis if you move the speech to a different setting, e.g. standing up in class when people are trying to learn, and shouting that the principal is a "fucking dick." But that's not what this student was doing.

After all, if the regulation of off-campus speech were justified in order to prevent harm or embarrassment to the principal, carry that through to its logical conclusion: Suppose a former student, who had since graduated, created the parody MySpace page and e-mailed it to friends at the school. The school's "interest" in preserving order and protecting the principal's reputation, would be exactly the same -- and yet no court has ever suggested that the government can punish a former student for speech outside of school (unless the speech rises to the level of threats or libel, which anyone can be punished for, regardless of the former student-principal relationship). To be punished, the former student would have to bring the speech into the school, where it could cause a disruption (and where, as a non-student, they could be banned from the premises anyway).

As for the second problem, apart from the issue of whether offensiveness alone is enough to give the school the right to punish a student for off-campus speech, there is the question of what criteria Judge Munley used to determine that the MySpace page was more offensive than the student off-campus speech in previous cases. In Latour v. Riverside Beaver Sch. Dist. , the court found that a student's rap lyrics which made mock threats toward another student, identified by name, could not be treated as a true threat because they were the kind of boastful posturing that rappers are known for (apparently including the ones in junior high school these days). Similarly, the MySpace page created in this case, began with the words:

yes. It's your oh so wonderful, hairy,
expressionless, sex addict, fagass, put on this world
with a small dick PRINCIPAL

and hopefully the principal would agree that any reasonable reader would know this was not written by him. So if the content of the speech in both cases was clearly not meant to be taken seriously, a fair apples-to-apples comparison would be to ask which is the more offensive topic: violence, or a joke about a principal listing among his "interests": "detention, being a tight ass, riding the fraintrain, spending time with my child (who looks like a gorilla), baseball, my golden pen, fucking in my office, hitting on students and their parents"?

What Judge Munley seems to be saying is that joking about murder is more acceptable than joking about a principal hitting on students. While I think this is absurd and offensive to victims of violence, I have to admit that this is at least consistent with standards of censorship in the U.S. It's a tired old complaint, but it's never been satisfactorily answered: Why can you show a character being killed on television, but a sex act is taboo? Why are the most offensive swear words derived from sex acts and sex organs, but there are no equivalent words for murder that are banned from the airwaves? What's worse?

Third, the judge seemed to adopt the position that because the student could theoretically have been prosecuted for creating the fake MySpace profile, that made it acceptable for the school to impose a milder punishment that circumvented the court system. Judge Munley wrote:

The speech at issue here could have been the basis for criminal charges against J.S. Additionally, the state police indicated to McGonigle that he could press harassment charges based upon the imposter profile. (Dep. McG, 98- 99). McGonigle indicated that he would not press charges, but asked the police officer to contact the students involved and their parents to inform them of the seriousness of the situation. (Dep. McG at 99, 163-64). The officer summoned the students and their parents to the state police station and discussed the seriousness of the profile and that McGonigle would not press charges.

It's at least debatable whether the MySpace page, which was an obvious parody, could have been the basis for criminal charges. But suppose we grant the judge that point. In that case, even if we know that someone's actions would have gotten them a more severe punishment from the courts, is it acceptable to give them a lighter punishment for something else, just because that's simpler for the school?

No. First, because it fosters disrespect for the rule of law in general: If you committed X, then you should be punished for X, according to the rules set up for punishing X. When Judge Jackie Glass began O.J. Simpson's trial this month for robbing two men at gunpoint, she told jurors: "If you think you are going to punish Mr Simpson for what happened in 1995, this is not the case for you." She, like most sentient beings, probably believed privately that O.J. committed the murders in 1994, but she knew the rule of law was more important than the outcome of any one case, even a murder trial. Second, lighter punishments (such as a suspension from school) often come with a lower standard of judicial review, so you could end up getting an undeserved punishment, in cases where a proper trial for the actual crime at issue might have found that you should not have been punished at all. (Al Capone did get put away for tax evasion, but the court found that he was in fact guilty of tax evasion -- they weren't reaching that as a compromise to avoid trying him for his crimes as a gangster.)

To come clean, however, I have to admit that I have tried to egg judges down that route occasionally. I've taken spammers to court and gotten them to say, under oath, that they never sent any spam and didn't know what I was talking about, before I revealed a tape-recording of a conversation (recorded legally) in which they offered to send 5 million pieces of spam for $500, that the spams were routed out through a server in China to help defeat spam filters, etc. The idea was that the judge would get pissed at the spammer for committing perjury, but realize that it would be too much paperwork to prosecute that, so just bang them over the head with a thousand-dollar judgment for spamming, which would go to me. Unfortunately this can backfire if the judge is so opposed to anti-spam suits that no amount of evidence will convince them anyway. But even if it had worked, it would not be strictly correct to say that justice had been done -- perjury should be punished as perjury, even if only with a slap on the wrist.

So, I'm sure that Judge Munley was trying in his own way to do the right thing by preserving order in the school system, but he probably decided in advance what conclusion to reach, and came up with the arguments after the fact. Still, it may not be a loss for student rights in the long run. The ACLU, which represented the student, has not said whether they will appeal, and anyway, virtually all other caselaw so far has said that student speech off campus is protected, as Judge Munley himself pointed out.

A court in France ordered eBay to pay more than 61 mega-dollars to the parent company (LVMH) of Givenchy, Fendi, Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton, because a user sold fake goods on the website. eBay has been sued by other 'luxury goods' vendors (such as Tiffany's (US), Rolex (Germany) and L'Oreal (EU)). Problems stem from some companies demanding that their merchandise (even legal merchandise) not be displayed nor sold as it is a violation of their 'property.' Others have complained that eBay is too slow to take down claims. Apparently eBay was hit with two violations: 1) eBay illegally allowed legitimately purchased and owned products made by LVMH to be resold on its website by 3rd parties not under the control of LVMH, and 2) not doing enough to protect LVMH's brands from illegal sales. eBay has said it will appeal. So eBay is to know what products every company allows to be sold before allowing them to on auction?

(There's also coverage at Yahoo News.)

Update: 07/01 17:15 GMT by T : That's LVMH throughout, rather than LVHM, as originally rendered.

The irony is that this is how laws are supposed to work anyway. Laws have been struck down as being "void for vagueness" on the theory that people ought to be able to read them and know what they mean. But what does "vagueness" mean, if not that different people cannot independently agree on what a law means, and even the nine highest-ranked legal experts in the country are split 5-4 on how to read it? Some Supreme Courts, such as under William Howard Taft, tried to reach unanimous verdicts whenever possible on the theory that it would persuade people of the correctness of their decisions. But unanimity doesn't prove anything if it was achieved by agreeing to agree. Only if judges were put in separate rooms and independently agreed on how to apply a law to a given case, would that prove that the clarity came from the text of the law itself. Legislators ought to start at least trying to pass laws that would meet that test.

For some reason we seem to have just accepted the alternative as the status quo, where laws are passed that express a general sentiment ("no spam with a 'misleading' subject line") but nobody thinks that you could put two people in different rooms and expect them to agree on how the law would apply in most cases. The parties involved in the first court cases may have to spend ruinously large amounts of money to get to the point where judges rule on how to interpret the law, only to find that lower court judges disagree with each other. Meanwhile, anybody bringing a case now has to look up not just the law, but reference the lower court rulings that support their side, while their opponent of course references the other rulings. And even if a case does finally get appealed up to the Supreme Court, which issues a ruling binding on all lower courts, future researchers still can't find out the state of "the law" by looking up the statute; they have to look up the statute and read the Supreme Court ruling which states how the statute should be read (which may still be ambiguous as applied to their current situation). All of this costs a lot of money, which results in a huge waste of resources if both sides can afford it, and tilts the playing field if only one of them can.

I wonder if the reason this is so widely tolerated is because people have absorbed the notion that making and interpreting laws has to be hard, like brain surgery. But brain surgery is hard because the brain is naturally complex and not man-made. Lawyers also have to learn a lot of complex procedures, but not as complex as brain surgery; the major difficulty in a court case is guessing how the judge may interpret an ambiguous law (which is not "difficult" so much as a matter of being lucky), and knowing the unwritten rules that govern what actually happens (including which written rules are followed and which ones are ignored). And there's no reason in principle why this guesswork couldn't be reduced by having laws be more clear to begin with, and putting the "unwritten rules" down on paper.

I watched a scaled-down version of this play out in the first few cases that I brought against spammers in Small Claims court in Washington (although it involved only a waste of resources, not money, since Small Claims doesn't allow lawyers). You know the chorus, so all together now: Some judges said you could sue people out-of-state, and some said you couldn't. Some judges said you could sue for statutory damages in Small Claims, and some said you could only sue if you'd lost money. Some judges said that you could represent a corporation that you own, and some said that if you're a non-lawyer, you can't even represent your own corporation. Some said you could sue under a federal law in Small Claims, and some said you could only sue under a federal law in federal court. There are many more examples, and those were just the contradictions about Small Claims court procedure generally, not even counting the specific issues raised by the anti-spam law.

But as much as I've complained about that in the past, I don't blame the judges for that part. If the law is unclear, then judges have to come down one way or the other. (What I've complained about is when judges say that their interpretation is "the law", and that if you don't get it, you have to do more research. Lawyers know to take this kind of comment with a grain of salt, but a non-lawyer who takes it at face value, could end up wasting dozens of hours or hundreds of dollars in lawyer's fees before realizing that the judge's interpretation was not actually the law, and a different judge might have said the opposite. The judge should just be honest and say, "Well, I'm the ref and this is how I'm calling it. On another day with another judge you might get something else." I've had cases heard by some judges who basically said as much.) Often both interpretations are reasonable, but that's the point -- if both interpretations are reasonable, then there's something wrong with the way the law is written!

For example, there was the judge who said that you couldn't sue in Small Claims unless you'd lost money, because Small Claims jurisdiction is limited to "cases for the recovery of money only if the amount claimed does not exceed four thousand dollars". Most judges interpreted "recovery of money only" to mean that Small Claims courts can only award money damages, and not, for example, order someone to return property. Two judges, however, said that "recovery of money" implied that you could only literally "recover" money that you used to have and then lost (relying on the common English meaning of the word "recover"). In legal jargon, however, "recover" often simply means taking something from another party, and I won one such case on appeal after I submitted three Supreme Court rulings as evidence that used the phrase "recover statutory damages" or "recover punitive damages" in that sense, since statutory damages and punitive damages refer to money over and above what the plaintiff actually lost. (The original judges did not change their minds, but one of them later recused herself from any future spam cases filed by me, a move that I thought was questionable.)

Here's another example where there's no excuse for the law not to be completely clear, since it's specifying a number. To appeal a Small Claims ruling in Washington, you have to post a bond for "twice the amount of the judgment and costs, or twice the amount in controversy, whichever is greater". Presumably the "amount in controversy" means the amount that the plaintiff was suing for. But hang on -- in Small Claims you can't possibly be awarded more than you sued for. And that means the "the amount of the judgment and costs" will always be less than or equal to "the amount in controversy"! So why not just say "twice the amount in controversy"?

Or perhaps the "amount in controversy" only means the amount that the plaintiff and defendant disagree on. So if you sue someone for $2000, and the defendant agrees on the first $500 but not the remaining $1,500, and the judge's interpretation falls in between and she awards you $1,200, how much of a bond do you post if you want to appeal? $3,000, literally twice the "amount in controversy" between you and the defendant? $2,400, twice the amount of the judgment? $1,600, twice the difference between what you sought and what the judge awarded you? $4,000, twice the amount you sued for?

Beats me. When I first started out, I'd drive myself and my lawyer friends crazy asking, "Well, what's the rule? What's the answer?" Well, now I know: There is no rule, it just depends on what the judge says. Actually in this case, it depends on what the clerk says -- because it's the clerk at the courtroom's front office, not the judge, who handles the paperwork for an appeal and checks that you posted a bond for the right amount, so you have clerks effectively deciding how to interpret the law. (Just last week, after I sued a telemarketer for $1,500 and won a judgment for $565, the telemarketer appealed by posting a bond for twice that amount, or $1,130. This doesn't seem correct under any interpretation of the law, since the "amount in controversy", however you define it, was greater than the "amount of the judgment" of $565.)

Sometimes, courts have settled on how to interpret a rule, but the interpretation is still different from what the rule actually says. The Small Claims form that you serve on defendants says, "You are further notified that, in case you do not appear, judgment will be rendered against you for the amount of the claim as stated herein below..." This is not true -- you can lose even if the other party does not appear (if the judge thinks, for example, that a spam's subject line was not misleading enough). I understand that having that line on the form serves a useful purpose by getting people to show up. But it's still wrong, and everybody knows that it's wrong, and it's on the form anyway.

A more serious example: When I first started suing spammers, if I thought they would show up in court, I'd sometimes try to go to the trouble of catching them in a lie, like the guy who showed up and claimed he didn't know anything about any spam, before I showed that I had recorded a phone call where he admitted that he could send out 5 million e-mails from Chinese servers for $500. (Yes, taping the call was legal -- follow the link for more info.) The written rule is that if you lie under oath in court, you can be arrested for committing a felony, even if the case is only a civil trial. But it turns out the unwritten rule is that perjury in a civil case is almost never prosecuted, and in most of my cases where I had proof that the defendant lied, the best that would happen was that I'd just win the civil case anyway, and sometimes not even that. It's not just Small Claims, either -- in one currently ongoing case, the defendant's lawyer just filed an answer to our complaint stating "Plaintiff subscribed to receive our e-mails". There's absolutely no way their attorney believes that to be true (with the spam in question being sent by mortgages spammers from forged domains, it's hard to see how anyone could "subscribe" to receive those mails even if they wanted to), but attorneys are required to submit such briefs with good faith in their veracity. So why isn't he on the hook for that? Because of the unwritten rule that courts just don't make a big deal out of it.

The point is that none of these issues is hard to grasp. The difficulty lies not in understanding the problems, but in the impossibility of guessing how a judge will interpret an ambiguous rule -- or, in the case of an unwritten rule which contradicts the written ones, the difficulty of knowing the unwritten rule if you don't have a lawyer's experience.

So, ambiguous laws could be divided into three categories:

1. Laws and rules where there ought to be no ambiguity at all -- for example, rules about who can be sued where, and for how much, and what size bond you have to post if you want to appeal. The fact that these laws are not clear enough to be universally agreed up on, is just silly. (Again, if judges have a conference or an e-mail discussion and decide on an interpretation, that doesn't mean the law as written was clear -- in fact, the fact that they had to have that discussion, proves that it wasn't.)

2. "Unwritten rules" that are generally agreed upon by lawyers and judges, but which are not actually written down or may even contradict the rules codified into law. Are trials and proceedings actually conducted according to written rules? The acid test for this would be: Hire a physics professor or somebody (so the legal establishment can't use the excuse of calling him a dumbass) and have him look at the history of events and documents in a typical civil case, from the vantage point of one side's lawyer. At each stage in the proceeding, before the professor sees what the lawyer actually did next, have the prof try to figure out what they would have done, based on the written rules. (The question is not whether the prof would have come up with the same strategy as the lawyer, but whether they would have done something that was procedurally correct at all.) If there are too many cases where the professor does something that technically conforms to the written rules, but where the lawyer says it would have been rejected by the court as procedurally invalid -- and if the same thing keeps happening with more and more smart non-lawyers trying the same experiment -- then this suggests that either the procedures need to be changed to conform with the written rules, or the written rules should conform with the procedures. (Because actually changing laws and rules is so hard, a better idea would be to publish an "annotated version" of the court rules which describes the procedures the way they are actually followed.)

3. Laws governing situations where ambiguity is hard to get rid of -- for example, the part of the Washington anti-spam law prohibiting "misleading subject lines". Here the question is whether a mushy category like that could ever be clearly defined so that people would independently agree on what it meant.

For the first two categories, bringing some clarity to those laws ought to be a no-brainer. Some candidate like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich who can say whatever they want because they're not going to win anyway, should make an issue out of it. They wouldn't have to fix the problem all at once. They could just promote it as a core American value that has been overlooked: Laws and court rules should be clear, and they can't be called clear unless people can independently agree on how to read them. The Left could get behind it because it would bring more equality between the rich and poor in the legal system. The Right could get behind it because they style themselves as the party backing judges who are "strict constructionists" that apply the law as literally as possible. (Although at the risk of alienating potential right-wing supporters, I don't think that "strict constructionism" would have much meaning until laws are clarified using something like this process. To say that this or that judge is a "strict constructionist" under our current laws, often sounds to me like a bunch of hooey, when the laws are too ambiguous for anybody to strictly construct anything out of them. Clarence Thomas, who is often held out as an example of a "strict constructionist" judge, has said that Tinker vs. Des Moines, the Supreme Court case that extended First Amendment rights to high school students, is "without basis in the Constitution". But there's nothing in the First Amendment to say that it's limited to individuals over 18, although ironically most "strict constructionist" judges and their supporters, read it as if it is.)

The third category of ambiguous laws would be more interesting to try to fix. Would it be possible to come up with a standard for a "misleading" subject line that everyone could agree on? Probably not. But I think you could measure the ambiguity of a law by using testers and test case writers in the kind of procedure I suggested in the first paragraph, and you could get to the point where there was less disagreement among the testers on how to interpret the law as applied to typical subject lines.

If lawmakers knew in advance that their laws would be subject to that kind of test, they would write them more clearly the first time around. Why couldn't laws be written to include a list of hypothetical situations, for example, specifying which situations the law covered and which ones it didn't? For example, a list of sample spam e-mails to illustrate what the law means by a "misleading subject line". Of course, the trouble with picking examples to illustrate your own points, is that people tend to pick examples that fall squarely in the middle of the categories they're illustrating ("your refund has been processed" is misleading, "printer cartridges for sale" is not). If the lawmaker included illustrative cases like this that were too-obvious examples of what they were describing, then the "test case writers" would be able to shoot down the proposed law by picking hypothetical cases that were closer to the borderline (so that in the third phase, when the testers tried to apply the law to those borderline cases, different testers would classify the borderline cases differently, and the law would fail the vagueness test). To mitigate this, the author of the law should pick illustrative examples that would be at or near the borderline, thus providing clearer guidance as to where the boundary lies between a misleading and non-misleading subject line. Which is what they should be doing in the first place.

Now, there are some problems that even the double-blind test for unambiguous laws, would not solve:

• Judges could be systematically biased against a particular law (and even proud of it), in which case they can make things difficult for you even if the law is unambiguous. Or, they might be so biased in favor of a law that they carry it further than the clearly proscribed boundaries, as in the case of a judge who upheld the conviction of a man for sending sexually explicit instant messages, even though the law in question was clearly limited to e-mails.

• Judges may not take cases seriously from non-lawyers. In one series of cases that I brought, I filed written motions with two of the pages stuck together by a tiny thread of paper, so that after the judge ruled, I could examine the motions in the court file to see if the thread was still intact. I found that about half the time, the judge had rejected the motion without reading it.

  This is a hard obstacle to overcome, especially after the Commission on Judicial Conduct ruled that it was not a violation of the Code of Conduct for a judge to reject a motion without even turning the pages. It wouldn't do any good to show that judges ruled against pro se (self-representing) plaintiffs more often than against lawyers, because judges could claim it was because pro se plaintiffs just made more errors (although it would be hard to use this excuse to explain why judges rejected briefs without reading them at all). One way to test this would be to have judges conduct the trials "blind" so that they would see the briefs presented by each side, but they wouldn't know whether the brief was submitted by a lawyer or a non-lawyer representing themselves. However, this would require difficult changes to the way legal procedures are conducted

  A simpler way might be: Once the "unwritten rule book" has been authored, such that your typical non-lawyer in the above experiment knows what kind of briefs to submit at each stage of a trial, have a legally trained third party look at briefs written by the lawyer and briefs written by an average lawyer, and see if they can tell which is which. If the third party can't tell, then that indicates the non-lawyer is writing the briefs almost indistinguishably from a lawyer -- and then if a judge in a real trial keeps hammering them for "procedural violations", it would be because of the judge's knowledge that the party was a non-lawyer, and not because of what the party actually did. On the other hand, if the judge ruled against the person in the same proportion that that person's briefs were being flagged as "obviously written by a non-lawyer" in the double-blind experiment, then that would indicate the judge was being fair.

• Even if a law is perfectly unambiguous, judges may disagree on whether it is constitutional under the First Amendment, for example. Making these situations unambiguous would involve tampering with the First Amendment, probably not a good idea in this or any other political climate.

• It wouldn't do anything about the corrupt process by which laws are often passed in the first place, in exchange for campaign contributions. (As one scholarly analysis says, "It's exactly like buying a hamburger, except that under our laws, everybody must pretend that nobody is buying anything, and nobody is selling anything.")

But notwithstanding these problems, I think any law that could pass the double-blind interpretation test, would be an improvement over one that can't. First, because it appeals to our sense of fairness to have rules clearly laid out. Second, if we really followed the void for vagueness doctrine, laws would be able to pass that test anyway. Third, economists have documented that there are economic benefits to having stability and predictability in the law. Economist Thomas Sowell wrote in Race and Culture that in some historical periods, even when groups given second-class status under the law (such as Jews in Eastern Europe or the Chinese in Southeast Asia), they were able to prosper better than they did elsewhere, as long as their basic property rights were protected, and the laws, even the discriminatory ones, were consistent and predictable!

This isn't something that would require a wholesale change in a state's constitution or lawmaking procedure. Any legislator could voluntarily try this process out to see if it resulted in laws that were easier for constituents to understand, and had a greater chance of being interpreted by judges to give the result that the legislator wanted. Imagine having an anti-spam law, for example, which said:

Misleading subject lines are prohibited. This includes not only subject lines which contain false advertising, such as:

• 'lotion that cures baldness'
• 'legal copies of Windows for $20'

but also subject line that mislead the user into wasting time on a message. This is because a large part of the harm done by spam is not due to the falsity of the advertisements, but due to the time that users waste on each message before realizing that it's an advertisement. As such, misleading subject lines include those that mislead the user into thinking that the message is from a personal acquaintance, such as:

• 'Congratulations!'
• 'Touching base'

or a subject that misleads the user into thinking that the message is a 1-on-1 communication, such as:

• 'Re: Question about your website'
• 'Shareholder request'
• 'urgent cancer call'
• 'Reminder: link to your website http://slashdot.org/'

[Except for the first group, all of these are subject lines from real spams that I received, which Small Claims judges ruled were not misleading. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think they are applying the standard of whether a spam constitutes fraudulent or deceptive advertising, not whether it tricks you into opening it. But the original author of the anti-spam law, when talking about other proposed measures, stated that the point of anti-spam laws is that "Computer users should be able to know instantly what's spam and what isn't."]

If you were reading a series of legal statutes and came across one written like this, it would be jarring, like reading a Wikipedia article about cell division and then getting to the part where someone wrote "And Bennett is gaytarded". But that's because we're accustomed to laws being ambiguous, not spelling out how they should be interpreted using reasons and examples. I would like to see some lawmaker, somewhere, insert a law into their state's legal code that looked and sounded something like this. The idea is so radical that maybe it could only be done by an eccentric, like the congressman who had Elmo testify before a Congressional committee before he was arrested for bribery (the Congressman, not Elmo), or the guy who passed a House Resolution commending Napoleon Dynamite ("any members who choose to vote 'Nay' on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!"). Or maybe it would be up to a regular lawmaker who thinks, what the hell, let's write a law so that people can agree on what it means, and see if it starts a trend.

As for taking the rules that ought to be clear once and for all, like who can be sued where and for how much, some 3%-getting-candidate should start talking about it. When I read an article about how some lawsuit was stalled because a lawyer complained that it was filed in the wrong district, I can barely keep reading because I get sidetracked thinking this is such a pathetic reflection on our legal system. If the rule about where the suit can be filed is unambiguous, why aren't the lawyers sanctioned for raising it as a false issue? If the rule really is ambiguous, why hasn't it been made clear a long time ago? If you support (or are) a politician or candidate who wants to ask these questions, the field is wide open.

In the aforementioned instance, AboveNet and TeleGlobe were not selling "parental filters" or other common types of filtered Internet access; the users being blocked from our Web sites were adults paying for what they thought were unfiltered Internet connections. What had happened was that AboveNet and TeleGlobe signed up to block Web sites on the Realtime Blackhole List, a list which was widely (but inaccurately) thought to be a list of "spammers", put out by a group called the Mail Abuse Prevention System. (MAPS and the RBL still exist, but under new management and in a form that bears little resemblance to their late-90's forerunners.) Most ISPs that used the RBL used it to filter only incoming e-mail, but AboveNet went all-out and blocked users from even viewing RBL'ed web sites, presumably because two of MAPS's founders, Paul Vixie and Dave Rand, were on the AboveNet board of directors. And it turned out that the RBL not only included spammers, but also Web sites that were not sending mail at all but were blocked because of their content -- in our case, our ISP got blocked because some other customers were selling mailing list software that MAPS believed could be too easily abused by spammers.

These two distinctions -- (1) the distinction between blocking incoming e-mail from spammers, versus blocking Web sites; and (2) the distinction between blocking traffic due to spam activity, versus blocking sites because of their content -- both go to the heart of what Net Neutrality is, and isn't, about. Net Neutrality is about user preferences -- not meaning that as a buzzword, but as an actual guiding principle to figure out what is and is not covered by the cause. If an ISP filters incoming mail from known spammers, that generally improves the user experience, and is something many users would expect an ISP to do anyway. But if an ISP blocks users from reaching Web sites (even, for the sake of argument, the Web sites of actual spammers), then that's generally counteracting the user's wishes -- if the user didn't want to go there, they wouldn't have typed it in. (After all, I visit spammers' Web sites all the time, usually right before I sue them.) Similarly, if an ISP blocks traffic from sites because of spam or other network abuse, that serves to protect their own users. But if an ISP blocks users from viewing sites because of their content, that's generally not expected by users, unless they've specifically signed up for something like parental controls. The Snowe Net Neutrality amendment proposed last year recognized both of these distinctions, and stated that nothing in the amendment would be interpreted to prohibit spam filtering, parental control services, or measures to protect network security.

The MAPS incident thus shaped most of my opinions about Net Neutrality 6 years before the debate even had a name. When I first found out in August 2000 that our ISP was blacklisted, like most people I believed that the RBL really was a list of spammers; after all the MAPS web page said that the RBL was a list of networks that "originate or relay spam". So I called my ISP screaming at them for being incompetent spam-enablers (the culmination of many frustrating issues with them), and saying that if they really were letting customers send spam, or running an insecure server that spammers were hijacking, I would leave on principle, if the cretins managing our server didn't drop it in the lake first. The ISP owner then told me what happened: that the ISP was not blacklisted for spamming customers, but because of the content of the other sites. (Buried in the list of RBL criteria on MAPS's site was the statement that sites could be blacklisted for providing "spam software", although the criteria did not define how they distinguished between spam software and regular mailing list software, which is how our ISP got caught in the net. And the criteria did not disclose anywhere the most controversial feature of the RBL, which is that if an ISP didn't comply, MAPS would start blacklisting other unrelated sites at the same ISP to put more pressure on them.) I agreed that this seemed to be absurd, and said I wouldn't leave the ISP if they were being blackballed just because of the content of hosted pages.

I don't know exactly what the mail software in question did or where MAPS thought the line should be drawn, but I am a purist about content -- it's a long-standing principle among the Internet security community that if a tool exists which exploits a security hole, you don't try to make the software disappear, you fix the hole. And besides, since MAPS and their supporters wanted to blackball ISPs that hosted spamming software (however you defined that), but the same people had never advocated blackballing ISPs that hosted network break-in tools and other cracking programs, for example, then what were they really saying? That spamming someone more unethical than breaking into their network?

But by far the most common objection to my complaint about AboveNet blocking Web sites was, "Hey, if a private company blocks things, as long as they're being honest to their users about it, who cares?" Well, true, but the fact that AboveNet blocked Web sites was not widely known even within the company; when I once called AboveNet feigning ignorance and asking them if they blocked RBL'ed Web sites, the technician who spoke to me said, "No, that wouldn't make any sense." (Well, half right.) Their AUP mentioned "protecting users from spam" but said nothing about blocking Web sites. In fact, other than "family-filtered" ISPs and similar services, I've never heard of any company blocking Web sites that actually did try to make their users aware of it. (On the other hand, even if AboveNet had fully disclosed their filtering, they were still a backbone company selling connectivity mainly to ISPs -- and I think if you sell something wholesale that can only be re-sold to the public by fraudulent means, then you're at least partly complicit in that fraud as well.)

If you're tempted to argue that backbone providers should be allowed to block whatever they want as long as they bury it in their AUP (although AboveNet and TeleGlobe didn't even do that much), just consider: When you access Google from your home computer, have you read the AUP of every network that the packets pass through, to check whether they reserve the right to block or even modify your traffic? Without doing a traceroute, could you even name all the networks that the traffic passes through? Do you really want the burden to be on you to check with all of them every time there's a problem reaching a Web site? Or do you feel like there's an understanding that as long as you pay your bill, they should let you go wherever you want?

Some have argued that if an ISP blocks the user from reaching a Web site, then even if the ISP is defrauding the user, that's still strictly an issue between the user and the ISP. But if a user is trying to reach your Web site, the user is trying to give you something of value: their attention, their eyeballs on your advertisements, sometimes even their money (with the expectation that you will provide them with something in return, of course, like some content worth reading). If the ISP steps in and blocks that, then the ISP has taken something of value that the user was attempting to give to you, and diverted it to serve their own interests. To me that doesn't seem ethically much different from the FedEx driver swiping the chocolates that someone tried to send you for Valentine's Day. Is that just between the sender and FedEx? Or do you have a beef because you didn't get the present that was intended for you, and you had to eat last week's chocolates to cheer up?

The modern-day threats to Net Neutrality are different: slowing access to Web sites unless the site owners pay a "toll", instead of blocking access to sites because of the content of other sites hosted at the same ISP. But they both boil down to the same thing: not giving end users what they have already paid for. If a user buys Internet access, they almost always buy it with the understanding that if they access a site, the content will download as quickly as their connection allows.

Thus the most common misconception about Net Neutrality is that the proponents are fighting against "capitalism" -- ISPs just charging more for different delivery speeds. But ISPs are already charging users for those delivery lines -- including different tiers for different prices. That's capitalism, and it works, with prices falling all the time in a fairly competitive market. But charging publishers for those higher delivery speeds to the user's house, is really more like double-billing, because the user has already been charged once for the lines that the content is coming over, so the ISP is trying to charge the content publisher again for the same service. Of course, if you charge party A for doing X, and then you try to charge party B for the same instance of doing X, and party B doesn't pay up so you don't do X, you're also breaking your deal with A. Brad Templeton of the EFF stated as much on his blog in 2006:

The pipes start off belonging to the ISPs but they sell them to their customers. The customers are buying their line to the middle, where they meet the line from the other user or site they want to talk to. The problem is generated because the carriers all price the lines at lower than they might have to charge if they were all fully saturated, since most users only make limited, partial use of the lines. When new apps increase the amount a typical user needs, it alters the economics of the ISP. They could deal with that by raising prices and really delivering the service they only pretend to sell, or by charging the other end, and breaking the cost contract. They've rattled sabres about doing the latter.

Anyway, this all came out in 2000 when a Slashdot article revealed that AboveNet had been blocking Web sites, and AboveNet stopped doing it two hours after the article came out. (TeleGlobe stuck with it for a few more months.) But from the hostility of the reaction, you'd think that we had published cartoons in a Danish newspaper showing Paul Vixie with a bomb in his turban. I got more e-mails than I could count arguing that AboveNet had the right to block whatever Web sites they felt like, regardless of whether the end users knew it was happening. To those people, I'd be sincerely interested in their answer to this question: Does that mean they've have no problem if they found out their ISP was silently blocking sites for political reasons? There is a clear line between following user preferences by blocking spam, and countermanding user preferences by blocking sites because of their content -- and once you've crossed that line, where's the logical stopping point? Seriously, I would have liked to have known how they would answer that, if I could have gotten any meaningful dialog going with them, which most of the time I couldn't. At the time, I'd just spent four years telling people that kids looking at porn was a non-issue, and that by the way if their kids came to my Web site I'd even help them get around their blocking software, and I still got more angry e-mails for disclosing the fact that AboveNet blocked Web sites based on their content, than I'd gotten in all the previous four years combined. (A few even accused us of moving into a blacklisted address block on purpose. This was because the actual move happened after the blacklisting was in place, even though I told them all that our ISP had announced the coming move two months before -- repeat, before -- they ever heard from MAPS. Some people were so in love with that "smoking gun" that they didn't believe me; that's their prerogative. But don't take my word for it -- when one supporter wrote to MAPS to ask about un-blocking our site, MAPS officer Kelly Thompson replied:

>Would it be possible to
>selectively unblock peacefire.org (209.211.253.169)?
Technically? Yes, it is. It's a violation of our policy, though, so I can't do so.

I would be willing to help you find other free or reduced cost hosting, however.

But what do all these people think about Net Neutrality, 6 years later? I tried to track down the influential people who had spoken out supporting AboveNet's blocking of Web sites, or at least their right to block Web sites. My position was, we can agree to disagree on that, but if they really feel that way, why haven't they been speaking out against Net Neutrality? The proposed Snowe amendment was pretty clear:

SEC. 12. INTERNET NEUTRALITY
(a) Duty of Broadband Service Providers- With respect to any broadband service offered to the public, each broadband service provider shall--
(1) not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service made available via the Internet.

John Levine, webmaster of Abuse.Net, head of the IRTF's Anti-Spam Research Group, and one of the most vocal critics of Peacefire's campaign against AboveNet's Web filtering, said that he would have opposed the bill but didn't bother because it didn't have much chance of passing. Well, it didn't, but the bill was significant not because of its likelihood of passage, but because it articulated the principles that the Net Neutrality coalition had rallied around, and with the momentum behind the movement, it's likely to achieve at least some of its goals, by legislation or otherwise.

Paul Vixie, Dave Rand, and Steve Linford did not respond to requests for comment on Net Neutrality. But Paul Vixie wrote something very interesting in a May 2006 blog post:

Second, there's network neutrality. In telephone service, the government mandates that all companies providing voice-grade telephony interconnect with eachother at preset rates, thus ensuring that any phone can call any other phone and that new phone companies can enter the field to help ensure competition. In Internet service, the government mandates nothing. Recently SBC (I mean AT&T, I think, is it Wednesday?) rattled its sabre and said that Google and other content supplying companies should be paying for the use of SBC's backbone to reach SBC's eyeballs. Most of us said, uh, what? "Aren't SBC's own customers paying SBC to carry that traffic?" Some of us even said "I am not an eyeball, I am a person!" But anyway, from time to time these Internet companies shut down interconnects in hopes of creating new cash flows among eachother, and until the government regulates this, we're all at risk of higher prices or lower service with zero notice. Some well meaning democrats are trying to challenge this with "network neutrality" legislation, but this probably isn't their year. Or their decade.

San Francisco has a government, though. And if San Francisco owned and operated its own wireless Internet plant, we could mandate that any Internet company wishing to do business in this city interconnect at fair and reasonable cost to all other Internet companies wishing to do business in this city.

"Until the government regulates this"? "Government mandates"? "Fair and reasonable cost"? Quick, call the anti-socialist intervention squad! How long does it take those San Francisco hippies to suck the new arrivals' brains out anyway? Of course, I agree with everything he said. It's just that if you replace "create new cash flows" with "try to get ISPs to remove content from their servers", this describes exactly what Vixie and AboveNet were doing a few years earlier. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure this didn't escape his sense of irony, so perhaps this confirms something I'd suspected all along, which is that Vixie understood the subtleties of the issue better than most of his cheerleaders, and may be having second thoughts about AboveNet's Web-blocking misadventure. From the beginning, in a 1997 interview with Sun World, he sounded like someone trying to at least keep an open mind:

Concentration of power into a single individual: It's very true that power has corrupted every individual in whom it has ever been concentrated in the history of mankind. I do not feel that I am necessarily above whatever elements of human nature give rise to that. I worry about it. Probably other people worry about it more than I do.

Speaking of which, Anne Mitchell, Director of Legal and Public Affairs for MAPS during the time when AboveNet was blocking Web sites, was the only MAPS adherent from the era that I could find who has since clearly and publicly come out against Net Neutrality. In May 2006 she wrote:

Here's the thing that the 3Ns (Net Neutrality Nuts) don't get: bandwidth costs money. And if you can't charge those who use the majority of it accordingly, then you are going to have to amortize it across everybody.

So, if a net neutrality law passes, don't be surprised when your costs to have an Internet account skyrocket.

Because somebody has to pay those bills, and if the law says that the ISPs can't charge the big guys - the big users - differently, it means that they have to charge them the same rate that they charge everyone else. And that means not that their rate will go down, but that everybody else's rate will go up.

Well, points to Anne for being consistent, and for publicly declaring her views in no uncertain terms, which is all I'm asking of the other supporters of AboveNet's website blocking policy. (Although she's coming at it from a different angle this time, "How do we work out who pays for the traffic" rather than "ISPs should be allowed to block whatever they want without telling anybody".) But this is also a textbook example of what I think are the three major fallacies of opposition to Net Neutrality:

First, lumping it together with other examples of unpopular regulation and calling it one more example of Big Government -- an argument also tried in other editorials ("Politicians and public figures alike should realize the absurdity of advocating more red tape to keep the Internet free"). This meme has never really caught on, possibly because groups like the ACLU and the EFF that have traditionally opposed true Internet censorship, have lined up in favor of Net Neutrality. All the proposed "red tape" and "regulation" really says is that if a user attempts to access a Web site over a connection that they've paid for, the ISP may not block or slow down their access, a law which most people would hardly consider tyrannical.

Second, asserting that "Network neutrality is the idea that ISPs should be forced to charge everybody the same for their Internet use." I've never actually heard anyone advocate anything close to that, but a common question among skeptics is why different "tiers" for Internet traffic are really any different from different-tiered pricing for dial-up vs. DSL, or for different levels of Web hosting. The difference is that when users and Web site owners pay for those connections, they are paying for their respective connections to the rest of the Internet. But an ISP charging a Web site owner to carry their traffic the last mile to the user's house, is not charging for a product or service, but really charging a fee not to break a service that they've already agreed to provide to the user.

Which leads to the third misconception: "Here's the thing that the 3Ns (Net Neutrality Nuts) don't get: bandwidth costs money... So, if a net neutrality law passes, don't be surprised when your costs to have an Internet account skyrocket." But it's not about how much a service costs, but about the ethics of double-billing for it. We know that ISP pricing models can already support the total traffic that people consume today, and ISPs do already follow net neutrality principles most of the time, so nobody's costs will "skyrocket" just because a neutrality law passes. If vastly more people start trying to stream CNN over the Internet 24/7, and fully using the services that ISPs have "only been pretending to sell" as Brad Templeton put it, then ISPs may have to charge more for users who consume too much bandwidth, encouraging people to stay at today's average levels by rationing themselves and perhaps watching 24 on their $5,000 TV sets sometimes instead of downloading it off of BitTorrent to their laptop every week because it makes them feel like a haX0r. Much as we all love our unmetered connections, it wouldn't be a violation of Net Neutrality for ISPs to charge users for bandwidth hogging, to keep everyone from going too far above today's levels. What ISPs should not do is charge users for implied full-throttle connections, and then turn around to charge publishers for moving bits over those same lines, or block the connection for any other reason.

So, yes, Virginia, blocking of Web sites does happen -- and by "Virginia", I mean FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, who said in a speech in August 2006: "I have to say, thus far, proponents of net neutrality regulation have not come to us to explain where the market is failing or what anticompetitive conduct we should challenge; we are open to hearing from them." This was echoed in an editorial later that month from Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute:

Internet service providers have voluntarily upheld content-neutral practices without the need for government intervention, and consumers would never stand for blocked Web sites... If the loss of net neutrality principles was really a problem, advocates wouldn't need to scare Americans in order to win their support. Using government regulation preemptively to shortchange business partners is a reckless abuse of the public policy process. New laws should be based on facts and reality, not fear and hypothetical situations.

Another theme in some anti-Net-Neutrality editorials is that existing laws are enough to deal with the problem. In Majoras's speech, she said, "We should not forget that we already have in place an existing law enforcement and regulatory structure." Arrison's echoed that "Numerous federal agencies already have set a basic legal framework in place to preserve fair competition and business practices on the Internet". Well, as Yogi Berra says, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. After I found out AboveNet and TeleGlobe were blocking my Web site, I called about twenty lawyers in the Bellevue phone book, figuring: I wasn't greedy, but surely there would be financial damages for deceiving users and blocking our site, enough to pay a lawyer in return for handling the case? I think about two lawyers called me back, and they both said that even though what the backbone companies were doing clearly looked like fraud, it would take tens of thousands of dollars just to get started, and even if we ever got to court, the judge could call it however they wanted. Whatever laws exist now, they may help the slightly smaller big guy against the bigger big guy, but are not much use to the little or medium-sized guy.

So, any informed debate about Net Neutrality has to include the fact that, yes, some providers have blocked Web sites on purpose, for long periods of time, and no, the free market didn't fix it by itself. Even if something on that scale never happens again, if the free market and the anti-trust laws didn't automatically correct a case where Web sites were being blocked outright, then it's wishful thinking to think that those forces will prevent ISPs from merely slowing down Web access to sites that haven't paid a "toll", as they have made noises about doing. One AboveNet customer, Sam Knutson, said when he found out about the Web site blocking, "This type of behavior on the part of an ISP is reprehensible. I pay for a pipe and don't expect this type of monkey business." Well, I agree that it's reprehensible; whether we should "expect" more of it or not, depends on how much the Net Neutrality movement achieves its goals.