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Student Web-Site Censors Stung for $62,000
Pru points to this CNET story, writing that "[Karl Beidler, a] teenager who was suspended from high school for building a Web page mocking his assistant principal has won $10,000 in damages." This was covered on politech last week as well, for the brave. Plus, the North Thurston School District (Washington state) has to pay up to the ACLU $52,000 in attorney fees, too. That's quite a disincentive for other schools to clamp down on parody sites.
Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, the ones paying are actually the other students. The payment is coming from the school district's funds, which - presumably - would otherwise be spend on the kids.
It's too bad that the distict was liable. Better to sue the actual fools that committed the offense.
With respect to this being a "dog bites man" story, I opine that the current climate is very much against online rights and protections. A court finding *for* speech rights online is worthy news indeed.
He published it in a format that was available to students on school property. I see no functional difference between this and a paper pamphlet. Please enlightment me.
The difference is a website is in public domain. A pamphlet is not. Yes, a student could have accessed it from the computer lab I suppose. They could also access it from home, as could you or I. By that reasoning, can I sue every website that has obcenity/pornography/violence/racisism for publishing material that could potentially slip by filtering software and be viewed by some student in a school lab? If so, I'd better have kids now so I can cash in. The only issue here was the principals pride.
On the brighter side, I think this was a wonderful education for the students there on how effective the Constitution is. It clearly demonstrated that 225 years later, our rights to free speech are still protected, and I hope that all of the history teachers there have a class on how Big Brother got screwed out of $60,000 for trying to abuse their power.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Hard to believe that this is even a story. A student gets suspended for doing something on his own time out of school? Give me a break! Glad to see they had to pay out for constitutional rights violations!
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The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
I'm afraid not, what about when the teachers go to the local pub or what not and bitch about those damn kids, and certain kids in particular.
The fact that it was accessible from the school PC's doesn't matter. He should have had the sys-admin block the site then. (still a violation of 1st amend rights but doubt it would have gotten the school system as bad as it did.)
His freedom was violated because he was blocked from continuing his education due to something he said. And with regards to the job environment, that is a private industry, not a government run institution. The asst. principle would have had less problems if they were in a private school setting.
What rule of a school, ANY SCHOOL, controls what a student says with his own computer, on his own webserver, on his own time, from his own home? You must have a pretty strange idea of how far the authority of a school extends.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Was the web site downloadable on school PCs? If so, this is no different than a student being suspended for distributing an obscene parody pamphlet, or running down the halls yelling obscene things about the assistant principle. Whether the site was downloadable on school PCs is irrelevant, because the speech was done publically and not through a school channel. Distributing an "obscene parody pamphlet" or "running down the halls yelling obscene things about the assistant principle" would get a student punished for violating school rules and disrupting school, but the key difference is that those are actions done while within the school building.
The boy's freedom of speech was clearly violated. As I said earlier, censoring and punishing free speech are more or less equivalent.
You miss the key difference, which is that the employer is a business, while the school is a government-run institution. Businesses are not bound by the first amendment, while government is.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
The kid's actions were wrong. He should not have published such images to the world. The *assistant principal* (not the school) had every right to report him to a) his parents, b) his ISP or c) the law.
The school, however, had no right to expel him - it was nothing to do with them. Therefore, I believe the judgment to be correct. Just.
</soapbox>
Hate to say it, folks, but I'm slightly on the principals side.
... well, distributing pictures of the principal having sex with Marge Simpson. Repeatedly talking about their penis in the classroom. Making a hobby of reducing a girl in the room to tears. Free speech, yes. But most of you haven't been in the position of teaching in a public school, so you might underestimate the problem. It ain't fire in a crowded theatre -- no one's life is threatened, but I can tell you that quadratics do not get solved and approximating functions for oil prices don't get come up with while this crap is going on.
One year ago I spent four months teaching algebra in a High School in a normal middle class area. It changed a few of the ideas I had about public education. One of them was that you could get by on charisma, intelligence, and efforts to do something beyond the ordinary -- and by "get by" I mean you could educate high schoolers w/o resorting to disciplinary tactics and falling back on institutional authority (I had managed to do so in the past, in an academic summer camp setting).
I was probably 80-90% right -- that's about the number of students who are willing to at least go with the flow and/or respect you for your knowledge and efforts. The problem is that you're left with an intractable 10-20% who really just don't want to be there and don't respect you, and simply because you ARE the institutional authority. They're looking for a conflict/power struggle. If you let them get out of hand, you start losing part of the rest of the 80-90%. And one of the ways to let things get out of hand is allowing disrespect of others (students) or authority figures.
I'm not talking about objections to the way things are done (though you'd be surprised how fast THOSE can get out of hand -- "But we're not READY for the test today... PLEEEAAASE can we move it to Monday?"). I'm not talking about appeals. I'm talking about things like
What's the last resort a teacher has with a recalcitrant student? Or a principal? Nothing, really, except one thing: the ability to decide if the student can continue to attend their classroom -- or for a principal, that institution. I won't ever teach in a public school unless I have an darn near unconditional right to say who gets to stay in my classroom. It's harsh, but it'd be the only way I can make sure I can do my job.
I'd love to find a nice way to resolve that with free speech, but I can't think of anything. The only thing I can think of is this: Free Speech is guaranteed to citizens in law. Free education isn't an unalienable right; it's probably a privilege more on order with a driver's license. You want your education, you don't do anything to make the jobs of educators any harder than they already are.
(To those who notice I posted the same thing when this appeared in YRO last week, I'm sorry. Duplicate submission, duplicate post. Ask the Slashdot editors why they didn't run this story in the main subject queue last week).
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Tweet, tweet.
I beg to differ, sir/madam...
IMHO, A lot of schools today go way too far.
suspending kids for taking advil, listerine, carrying cell phones, etc. This was just another example of today's schools going to far, and trying to implement a communist-like governmental system on kid's rights. It is about damn time someone sued the hell out of them for obviously trying to take away an individuals rights.
I am not saying that the content of that website the student put up was good at all, and yes his parents should have talked to him about it, but suspending the student for a month is way
out of line and totally overboard. A wrong-doing was committed on both parts but IMHO, it is more on the the schools part than the kids. I think the school should have had a talk with his parents about the website, and that is by no means violating the kid's first ammendment rights.
What are the schools teaching our kids here?
IMHO, they are teaching our kids basically they
can't even raise a finger or be punished. In a
sense they are try to teach our kids to be whimps
and not stand up for what is right and just "accept it".
And accepting the suspension? PLEASE! History
did not get us here by just accepting something!
We have gotten here today by our fore-fathers
fighting for what is right, and that is our freedom!
Just my 2 cents worth.
Free Speech is guaranteed to citizens in law.
Absolutely false. The Supreme Court has said, time and time again, that the Constitution grants absolutely no rights. Instead, the Constitution recognizes some rights as existing even in the absence of law which establishes them. Under American legal theory, free speech is a universal human right; that even were the Government to abolish the First Amendment tomorrow, citizens would still enjoy the liberty of speaking freely.
Free speech is not guaranteed to citizens in law. Law recognizes that citizens possess free speech, whether the government wants to recognize it or not.
If the government provided your right to speak freely, then the government could revoke that right at any time. They can't, because they don't provide it.
You want your education, you don't do anything to make the jobs of educators any harder than they already are.
The students don't have a choice in whether or not to show up to school, for the most part--skip school and truancy officers start looking for you. Apparently, you'd like to have it both ways: you'd like for students to be required to show up for school, and you'd like to be able to forbid them from school if they're being disruptive.
You can have it one way or the other, but asking for it both strikes me as hypocritical.
When speech causes harm, whether it be physical injuries, or mental anguish, to another person, the speaker has violated the rights of the target of the speech and therefore, not protected by the First Amendment. This is called slander or libel and is punishable by law.
/.
Yes, slander and libel are punishable by law.
No, slander and libel are NOT punishable by your principal!
The difference is that the law punishes people through due process and the review of a jury of their peers, whereas your local principal punishes you whenever he gets his panties in a bunch.
Do NOT confuse the issue. This is about whether a school can make rules about what students can say in their own homes, to their parents. It is NOT about libel.
Friends don't let retarded friends
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What happens when you outlaw guns
While free speech is protected by the First Amendment, there must be drawn a limit to which this umbrella of protection is stopped. That limit is drawn where your speech (or in this case, writings) causes harm to another individual.
Are you a lawyer? I am not either, but from what I've seen things are not quite that simple. Certainly a lot of things are printed and/or broadcast every day that everyone would agree are legal and protected by the First Amendment but 'cause harm' to another. Think political cartoons, think editorial pages, think National Lampoon, MAD Magazine, even, for example Hustler.
was right to have his website censored by the school system
The limit for the school to 'censor' such a web site should be limited to their ability to block it from access through the school's internet connection. The school should not be allowed to punish kids for what they do and/or say off school grounds and outside school hours. If any wrong was done to the associate principal, he should have to resort to outside means to have it righted, not by abusing his position of authority within the schools. What if the schools decide to start punishing kids for expressing political or religious beliefs on their own time? Sure, they might be able to keep them from doing it at school, but what right to they have outside the schools? What if a kid distributes political flyers outside school and another kid brings them to school? Who did something wrong, the kid who distributed the flyers or the one who brought them to school? If someone is viewing a web page at school that the school has somehow banned, then it should be them that is punished, not the person who created it.
When speech causes harm, whether it be physical injuries, or mental anguish, to another person, the speaker has violated the rights of the target of the speech and therefore, not protected by the First Amendment.
Not necessarily. In many cases the courts have held that material that undoubtedly caused 'mental anguish', for example, are protected by the First Amendment. Satire, for example was upheld in the well publicized supreme court case as dramatized in 'The People vs. Larry Flynt'.
This is called slander or libel and is punishable by law
Slander and libel are not only fairly narrowly defined, they are very difficult to prove in court. For example, satire is usually considered defensible when it should be obvious that the claims would not be mistaken as true (for example, Hustler magazine's fake ad which implied that Jerry Fallwell had incestuous relations with his mother).
Deliberately spreading rumors or insulting another person is against the law
Deliberately spreading false rumors may be illegal, or it may not. Deliberately spreading true rumors is almost always going to be legal. Insulting people is not necessarily illegal either. I could say 'I think Hillary Clinton is a lying, cheating bitch'. That is legal. If that is my opinion, then the statement is entirely factual, regardless of wheter Hillary really is a lying cheating bitch or not. In order for something to be libelous or slanderous, it has to be false. Saying 'I think the associate principal sodomizes goats' may be significantly different legally than saying 'I've seen the associate principal sodomizing goats'.
Just ask the National Inquirer.
Fine. The Enquirer wins almost every case brought against them. If they didn't, they'd have been out of business a long time ago, because they piss off a lot of people, especially politicians and celebrities who have a lot of influence.
I don't agree with the ACLU all the time, but it sickens me even more when I think of the warped sense of justice and what the consititution and bill of rights are all about that kids get sent by the wacked out school systems in this country.
Ah shut up.
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Finding God in a Dog
Nevertheless, while disrespect and disruptful behavior cannot be tolerated on the school campus, what happens off the school campus was not my concern. Frankly, I find it ridiculous that, as overworked as teachers and administrators are, they chose to make an issue of something that happened off-campus. That's *LOOKING* for trouble, and surely there's enough trouble *ON* campus for administrators?
Now, if this kid was going around *ON CAMPUS* saying to other kids, "Look at this disrespectful page I made!", and him doing that was disrupting class and the school environment, that's a different story. But you have to make that case, complete with documentation of how his *ON CAMPUS* behavior disrupted the school environment. This is under the old principle of "free speech does not cover shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theater" -- i.e., that disruptive speech on-campus is not protected speech. But the on-caompus speech has to be what's documented as the problem -- *not* the off-campus speech.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Why is it that 4/5ths of everyone here is thinking like a herd of knee-jerk buzzword fanatics? You see "1st Amendment" "webpage" "free speech" "student suspended for expressing opinions" etc. and he's the instant Martyr Du Jour.
Take a minute to project this same situation into a different setting: You make a website portaying your boss involved in various acts of vulgarity, and then you go and tell everyone in the office about it (don't even pretend this kid didn't tell everyone at school) and if(when) they figure out it's you there will be hell to pay.
High school is just like every other voluntary institution, if you don't want to be there, leave. And if you want to stay, don't piss people off and break the rules. When did people forget that actions have consequences? If I go and make lewd comments about some guys girlfriend and get pounded for it, I don't sue the guy for attacking my freedom of speech. Why is high school this magical place where you can say/do anything you wan't and shouldn't have to suffer the consequences
And speaking of doing things on your own time, what if I'm a high school kid smoking weed accross the street from my school after school is out, I'm off school property, and I'm not on school time, but I'll bet I would get in trouble for it. Why is anything I do on the web magically protected??
The point is: be careful what court cases you applaud. Personally the ACLU scares the S*** out of me, and when we are applauding the ACLU for robbing a school district of $62,000 to defend a kid's right to post slander and libel on the internet, I start really getting scared
P.S. Substitute the word "Principle" in the article with "Female classmate" and tell me who's side you are on.
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
>It's funny how people talk about consitiutional rights all the time, but fail to think about the spirit behind that constitution. The kid's a jerk.
Wasn't the Constitution and Declaration written by people the British would considered "jerks"?
Think about that when you talk about the "spirit of the constitution"
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Accepting and not questioning punishment for expressing a controversial opinion is going to help "the spirit of the constitution" sink in? What Constitution are you talking about? The one I'm familiar with says that everyone has free expression rights, even if you don't like what they say, and even if they're jerks.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The assistant principal could have easily sued for slander, or pursued some out of school action. I think he failed by trying to act within the school. What the kid did was mean and wrong, but it wronged the assistant principal, not the school.
But what about the rights of the censors. Aren't they entitled to free speech? Don't they have the right to tell some one to shut up? When will somone stand up for these people? The censors have a right to be heard, too!
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
Oh, and despite how this article in slashdot is titled, the crux of this case is more about abuse of authority than it is about censorship.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
In a civil rights act/employment discrimination lawsuit, the judge will award fees based on hours that an attorney put in.
If an attorney has a contingency fee agreement, then that amount of money goes into the pot and then the attorney get 1/3 of the pot.
This of course depends on the particular fee agreement in place.
Fight Spammers!
Not because the school had to cough up some dough, but because the value of America's educational system is being degraded day after day.
I wont put my voice behind this kid, if he wanted to voice something meaningful about the asst. principal, he would have found some better way than portraying the guy having sex with simpson, smoking marijuana and as a pedophile. These are quite harsh allegations and even if he deemed them funny, i am sure this hurts the general morale among teachers.
I am sure half of Slashdot would agree that they were better than the teachers that taught them, but then again, most of us would agree that wisdom that comes with age is ten times better than whats being taught as part of the curriculum. No wonder why people dont want to get in to the teaching profession anymore. After all, what do they get. Less money and to top it all, their own students alleging them of being a pedophile. I wouldnt be suprised if this shocks and saddens the whole teaching community as a whole
I agree that the school has nothing to do or has no power over what a student does after school. I wish the asst. principal had slapped a law suit on the kid and his parents first, rather than kicking him out of school.
My mother was a teacher, not in this country though. There are different method for teaching and some starts at the end of a cane. The parents and the kids accept this as a part of the learning process and everyone is better at the end of the day.
Rapid Nirvana