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School Official Sues Over MySpace Page
SoCal writes, "How much legal liability do parents have for what their kids do online? A lawsuit filed in Texas by a high-school assistant principal may give some answers. Some students she had disciplined set up a fake MySpace page in her name depicting her as a lesbian (which she happens not to be). In its coverage, Ars Technica notes that 'What sets this case apart from many other lawsuits filed over the content of blogs is that it doesn't target only the teenagers who created the site. It also argues that the parents were guilty of negligence by failing to supervise their children, and that they bear some of the responsibility for the defaming site.'" The article links the Media Law Resource Center's resource tracking more than 50 cases now in the courts nationwide, in which bloggers have been sued for libel and related claims.
Not that there's anything wrong with that!
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Maybe as a society we should stop focusing on blame quite so much and focus MORE on the 'why' surrounding the behavior. The principal's blaming the students for supposed 'improper' behavior, and the students' retribution for it are really part of the same problem.
It's about time. While I don't agree that the courts should be deciding cases on what amounts to a bunch of name-calling... it's good to see the possibility of holding parents accountable for their irresponsability with regards to their children. The government is getting too involved with banning activities for everyone just for the sake of protecting children because their parents refuse to.
I think if parents started being charged with involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide when their kids go on school schooting rampages, you'd see more parents suddenly taking an interest in their children's lives and activities.
Parents need to raise (and control) their children. That is not the role of the government. And it is not the role of the public at large.
But you cannot monitor EVERYTHING your child does. You have to work to keep the child clothed, fed, and sheltered and keep up with home maintenance and other every-day social tasks. It's impossible to keep an eye on a kid ALL of the time. I'm sure these kids are probably over the age of 12, which by then they should probably know right from wrong. I'd say give these kids 120 hours of community service and let them learn from their mistakes. Having their parents "sued into the poor house" seems a little extreme to me.
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
Myspace shouldn't receive any punishment because of things like this. Only the people who abuse the service should be sued/fined/restricted.
I recently learned that something very like this was happening at the school district where I work. Several teachers learned that someone had assumed their identities on MySpace and were posting defamatory remarks. My suggestion was to have the district's lawyer informally contact MySpace asking that the sites be taken down, and follow up with a C&D letter a week letter if they didn't comply.
No word concerning a lawsuit against the student(s) responsible.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
People should get used to the fact that lots of info one gets from the web is fake. So what?
And who cares about MySpace anyhow? A high-school assistant principal doesn't seem to be in the right circle of social relations to be harmed by that page.
If I were in the jury, I would propose a verdict "guilty but harmless, throw away".
Raising kids is hard work (got 2 me'self), and it is **your** work, not the state's or school's work or myspace's work!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm not in high school anymore, but I know it would have been impossible for my parents to monitor all of my online activities. I suppose the parents could have set up a filter to block certain sites, such as myspace, and while that may inconvenience the students, they would most likely find other means to let out their frustration, such as spray paint on the teacher's car.
Personally, I think what they did is about on par with yelling at somebody in a crowded room. It may hurt your feelings, but is anybody going to pay attention to it, and even if they do pay attention, how long are they going to remember it? Bringing a lawsuit will make even more people know about the incident, and assumedly, the teacher wants as few people to know that she had students calling her a lesbian, when she is in fact not.
These kids, for whatever reason, posted information that they knew to be wrong to hurt the teacher. This sounds like libel to me. Does it really matter why they put up the information?
I'm up in the air about making it the parents' fault.
On the other hand, I strongly disagree with the idea that "Allowing access to the Internet, unsupervised and without restraint poses an obvious and unreasonable danger that such children would utilize the Internet for illicit purposes"
Claiming negligent supervision over the kids' use of the internet.... that creates an incredibly high burden for any parent. Unless the kids have done this before, I can't imagine that the "obvious and unreasonable danger" charge is going to hold up.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I've seen a number of news stories over the years where parents had a rude awakening when their out of control teens did something really bad and they ended up on the other side of a lawsuit.
The end result seems that common law holds, by precedent, that parents have a legal duty to teach their children right from wrong. Unless it can be proved, by reason of obvious mental defect, that the child is incapable of learning this, then why not hold the parent liable when the kid does something bad enough to warrant criminal or civil proceedings?
Kids will be kids, to be sure, and there's only so much you can do. But the bar of "only so much" is one it seems many parents fail to clear. Wrapped up in their own issues, they don't stop and say: "I'm responsible for this kid and I need to put a few of my needs on hold so I can make sure this kid turns out okay."
The negligence that caused these kids to end up doing what they did was not recent, but systematic. I hope the principal wins a significant judgement, it holds up on appeal, and that the kids spend the rest of their lives being reminded how their own selfishness (likely learned from their parents) ruined the lives of their families.
- G
Start a happiness pandemic
Seriously, I've always wondered how someone can do it. The RIAA, this assistant principal...anyone.
How do they know, beyond a resonable doubt, who did it?
Seems like in this case you'd need logs from Myspace on what user and IP address did the deed. Then, you'd need logs from the ISP to match the IP to the account. Then, you'd need to prove which computer had that IP. And then, you'd need to prove who was actually on it at the time. And finally, wouldn't you have to prove that the box wasn't hacked/owned by someone else at the time?
It seems like you'd always have a reasonable doubt defense. "Your Honor, granted the attack came from my machine, but it wasn't me. I found a Zotob worm on my machine, and this person at high school who doesn't like me is always in the computer lab..."
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
what? becoming a parent means you have to look over your children's shoulders 24/7 until they're 18 (and heaven help you if you have more than 1 child, they'll just have to share a bedroom so you can deny them both privacy at once) because you have absolute responsibility until they turn 18?
It seems to me that that is what you're proposing, and it's the stupidest idea I've heard in a long time.
You send a pretty poor message about personal responsibility to kids by punishing their parents until they turn 18.
FGD 135
who thinks this is dangerous? I mean, didn't we see the news of someone who got convicted for posting negative comments online? Where does the line stop? Next thing you know, any type of negative opinion can be sued and we all know ALL of us are gonna get in trouble for the stuff we crap out on /.
It's rare when such an expression actually fits a situation. Usually, when someone says something like that, it doesn't make complete logical sense to me.
I, like so many others, would like to see parents being held accountable for many things such as the health and well-being of their children, and yes, their behavior as well. I have some issue with the reasons in this case, however.
Is it Libel to fraudulantly claim to be someone else and then claim things that are untrue? In many cases, examples of this sort of thing are found in comedy and other materials as a form of satire. Satire is generally targetted at public figures, but in their circles, an assistant principal is a very public figure. And making absurd or outrageous claims is all part of this thing we call freedom of expression in these United States.
If they were acting as themselves and reporting that they have evidence that what they claimed about their assistant pricipal was correct as stated, that might indeed be considered libel. But in this case, I would have to consider a MySpace blog posted in the first-person would have to beconsidered as nothing short of satire since it can be easily shown that the origins of the content were not truthful and therefore the whole set of contents were suspect. Under no reasonable circumstance could the content have been considered or mistaken as factual and therefore could only be construed as an artistic expression... a very First Amendment activity.
I think before parents should even be considered as partially responsible, let's first determine if there's an actual crime. I doubt this should be considered a crime in this case.
I, for one, am surprised that MySpace hasn't raised the maturity level of those that use it.
Internet! What has happened to you?? You had such promise...
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
The principal's blaming the students for supposed 'improper' behavior, and the students' retribution for it are really part of the same problem.
Yeah. The problem is, the kids got disciplined and instead of taking it like young adults they went and screwed around on the Internet, calling their teacher a lesbian (among other things). Sounds like some snotty brats that either haven't been properly parented or need some community service or something to redirect their energies.
On the one hand the government is continually taking more and more control away from parents (for example, if a young girl wants an abortion she can get one without having to obtain parental permission; children are routinely taken away from "unfit" parents; parents are not allowed to prevent their children from being exposed to school material they find objectionable). Then on the other hand we want to blame parents for their kids' actions. There is no denying that there has been a steady erosion of parental rights in the past few decades. You can't have it both ways. If it takes a village to raise a child, then it is the village that is responsible when that child commits a crime, not the parents who's authority has been, in many cases, usurped.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
1. Sharing is bad: Intro to Copyright Law
2. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but libel makes me call my lawyer
3. Sit down and shut up: Intro to Democracy
4. Why did those mean men take mommy away? Homeland Security for kids
The Asst Principal should be fired right now, for setting such a bad example. What ever happened to "Sticks and stones...". She is a grown adult. At no time is she in any danger by this myspace page, and any judge will recognize that. It's all completely harmless. At no time is she at risk for a financial loss by the page, and she won't be in the future. Nobody can prove any harm was done whatsoever. Sure, some bloggers are committing libel, but that's not the same as calling somebody a lesbian. However by seeking to retaliate against the students, she is displaying a very poor moral character and bad judgement. I would pull my kids out of the school immediately (whether they have anything to do with this or not), and/or go to the superintendant and complain.
Litigation for this is a flaming waste of time and tax-payer monies! The assistant principal should just blow it off instead she is litigious... that is just so... gay!
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
if you really view myspace as a "service" then you obviously don't understand the point of the post you replied to.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Seriously, McGinnis, Lochridge & Kilgore is a very big and very, very expensive firm. I doubt they're taking this suit on a contingent fee unless the kids come from some major legal money. Maybe the plaintiff just has mid five figures to burn through in a few months and wants to make a point (but I doubt that). So who's paying the legal fees right now? I'm thinking of a group that's mostly likely: white, christian and has a general intolerance for anyone or thing different (like the CCA or the FRC). Sorry, but it is Texas and this is America.
Answer this and we'll understand more about the goal of the suit.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
It's a free community allowing people to pretty much advertise theirself in a sense. They can upload a small biography, their pictures, and now their video. It's a community/network of people. It in my opinion is a service. If people misuse the 'service' by posing as people they are not then it is the person(s) who are at fault for illegal conduct, not the site. The content posted by the students is indeed degrading and deserve to be punished.
The only ones being sued are the kids and their parents (as far as the article says). The expected "sue anyone within 10 feet of anyone who has anything to do with this" reaction is notably absent.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Seems like all school administrators these days are requiring the LAW to teach students.
This is because the parents have made it this way. You wouldn't believe how much the hands of administrators and teachers are tied when it comes to disciplining a student in a public school. I wouldn't last a day without a lawsuit.
Case in point. My wife is an elementary school teacher. She had to take "restraint training" and I asked her what that was. It's training to "restrain" an unruly and potentially violent student. But here's the thing, she's not allowed to touch the student! The student can physically assualt her and the other children in the classroom, but she can't grab him by the wrist. Remember the saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"? Well, the students are the only ones allowed to have sticks and stones. Administrators and teachers can't even use words.
The best that can be hoped for is that the parents will take care of the situation, that's it. You can't punish a student anymore. You can't expel them. Parent's will sue, district's will give in. Basically, the unruly kids with poor parents have won. They can do whatever they want without any recourse. Which is why I hope this lawsuit succeeds. It's about time that the parents and courts agreed that sometimes kids need to be disciplined.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
Except that now you're trying to say the parent's aren't responsible for the children's actions.
The point here is that its the responsibility of both. Its just like when you're under 18 and you get a speeding ticket (we'll continue to use Texas as the example). Atleast in Harris County a parent, or legal gaurdion, is required to attend the hearing with you, its a matter of punishment to both the child and the parent. The child is embarassed and (hopefully) is required to pay the offense, and the parent is punished enough that they continue to drive the message home at home.
I haven't yet had a chance to read the article, or understand the details, but I'm guessing that the parents are indeed responsible of (at the least) neglect in the fact that they aren't policing the child's activities on the net. And if you are about to tell me that its an invasion of privacy, then you are far to liberal for me.
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
Is this libel? Sounds like it. I haven't seen it, didn't find a link, but from the description we've got untruth in writing or broadcast, tending to bring the target into ridicule/hatred, etc., all that.
Is it still libel on the Internet? The Internet makes it much easier to publish stuff for a wide audience, but you're still doing that, however easy it may be.
Are parents responsible for the acts of their children? Yes. In civil cases, and in many criminal cases, the parents can be held responsible.
Is this going to bring a "chilling effect"? I think the only thing it's going to chill is people publishing hurtful lies about other people online. I have no problem with that. The only thing new here is that minors have greater access to the eyeballs of the public at large than they did before.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I think too many people are downplaying the consiquences of having a fake myspace page in your name.
Myspace has become a common tool used by employers to seek out more information about their potential hires. If someone makes a fake page about you, portraying you as a satanist or druggy, or some other socially undesirable label then that could effect whether you get a job or not.
Aside from this it could put your existing job in jeopardy. What if the kids had made this page out to look like the teacher was a sexual predator, preying on her underaged students, and even go so far as to make fake blogs depicting sexual encounters with her students.
If the student's intent was malicious and not just to be funny, they could easily put the teacher's job in a situation for review. A student shows his parents the myspace page, the parent notifies otehr parents, brings it up to the pta, to the school board. All of a sudden this teacher is on a suspension until an investigation is complete as to whether or not this teacher is actually a sexual predator. This is the good-case scenario, worst case of course is that the teacher cannot prove her innocence and all this fake evidence is enough to get the teacher fired and even listed as a sex offender, being pubicly humiliated.
I can only imagine how difficult and lengthy the process is to get a fraudulent page removed from myspace unless it specifically violated several myspace rules.
Having been on the receiving end of similar incidents involving students at my school (I teach Algebra in a Jr. High), I have found MySpace to be very quick to delete profiles that are fraudulent or defamatory when they are notified. They are even quicker when you say that the students involved are likely to be under that magic COPA age of 13. Being a US company, they take the federal online statutes quite seriously. Had the pages in question been truly harmful, I would have taken further action of finding out which students were involved, contacting their parents, and pursuing further avenues as needed. There have been other students in my district that have been suspended, transferred, or outright expelled for things they have posted on MySpace. Hazing, bullying, and libel can very much extend into the digital realm and have repercussions in the offline world. Young and old need to be aware of that and treat it the same as they would someone making harassing phone calls, passing out flyers in a neighborhood, or taking out an ad in a newspaper.
I'm glad MySpace is not getting sued in this one. I didn't RTFA, but I have to wonder if the Vice Principal tried to resolve this with the parents before escalating it to a civil case. It is quite possible that she did and got a response along the lines of, "kids will be kids," or worse yet, "it couldn't be my child, you have no proof, I'm not going to do anything, I'm not listening, la-la-la-la-la-la-la."
Ok, enough rambling. Time to sleep.
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Sure, get the site taken down, and punish the perpetrator. But if you don't know who did it, the last thing that you want to do is stand in front of a group of rebelious teens and make idle threats.
Whoever decided to sue children over a bad joke should be locked away from society themselves. These kids and their parents don't deserve fines or jail time. They should have had their behinds tanned, been grounded for a month or so and have to do some community service. Why does this woman even care if others think she is a lesbian? Being a teacher she should be very used to kids saying untrue and nasty things about her. When I was in high school I was a horrible kid and I don't know how many times I said this teacher or principal was gay or a lesbian. It was the normal insult that most of my friends used. Now that I'm an adult I see how silly using gay or lesbian as an insult. If she acted like an adult and simply told the kid's parents and had the site removed the problem would have been solved without making her look like she has something to hide. Not that anyone should be hiding if they are gay/lesbian, not like their is anything wrong with it. Animals have been doing it for a long time. Those that doubt some animals are gay check this article that ran in Reuter's today. http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?typ e=scienceNews&storyID=2006-10-12T124838Z_01_L12870 614_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-HOMOSEXUALITY.xml&WTm odLoc=NewsArt-C2-NextArticle-2
WTF?
No kidding. Kids do stupid things all the time, some of which we should be concerned about, some of which are just "kids being kids".
These teens didn't exactly post shocking confessions about how they were abused by this person, and make claims of pedophilia. They claimed she was GAY. Maybe it's just me, but BIG FREAKING DEAL. I think the reactions here reflect more on the posters than on the teens - apparently being gay is such a horrible thing to most Slashdotters that accusations of it amount to libel. Sad, really.
Next, we'll see some 5 year old sued because they called their ex-best friend a "doodie head".
Lighten up, folks. It's a harmless teenage prank. Don't any of you remember being kids? Give the kids some community service. The parents are probably pretty damned embarassed. But a lawsuit against them? You'd think these kids had gone on a shooting rampage.
Yeesh.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
In earlier days, if students started passing around notes about this teacher, the teacher wouldn't receive obscene phone calls as a direct result. FTA: a few were individuals Ms. Draker did not recognize, that lived near Clark High School, and had made suggestive, lewd and obscene comments based on the content of the webpage.
Passing around notes about a teacher leads to a bunch of kids laughing and goofing around, pretty easy for a teacher to get over that. Posting a fake profile leads to local perverts contacting and maybe stalking the teacher, that's quite a different situation.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
detentions/suspensions? I've done a few defamatory things in my youth against other classmates and teachers. In the instances that I was caught, I just got a couple days of in-school suspension. That sucked enough that I didn't do it again until I transferred to a new school. This nation's policy of litigate first, ask questions later is really getting out of hand.
Parents are generally held responsible for their children's actions. Be it destruction of property, driving without a license and having an accident, someone getting hurt with a firearm, theft, and so on.
We don't need better firewalls. We don't need some intelligent filter at myspace to catch this stuff.
Hold the parents responsible for what their kids post. Even if I think my 13 year old should drink, and drive, and sell their body on the street, well, shucks, society and the law holds me responsible for their actions till they are 18. So I make sure that they are not drinking, or driving without a license, or prostituting themselves out. After a few parents pay some big fines, well heck, they will want to know what web pages their kids are working on.
This nonesense will all go a way in another generation. When the kids who don't remember what life is like before the internet existed grow up, they will watch their kids. They will not cop out and say they don't understand computers, or that their kids could do that. Life should be interesting once that generation of pirates and scallywags have kids of their own.
vi +
I don't know about everywhere, but in many places, the actual law is that teachers have every bit as much legal right to touch students to maintain discpline as a parent would, and certainly can restrain them (they can't inflict corporal punishment.) Lots of districts, though, apply hyperrestrictive policies for two reasons (1) they are afraid not of what is illegal but what might be close enough to the edge that someone might file a lawsuit that might cost the district some money even if the lawsuit ultimately fails, so they want to draw the lines in policy ridiculously far back from the law [often far enough back that I'm surprised there aren't more lawsuits for inaction that gets students in their care hurt], and (2) it gives them a hammer to blame controversial actions on individual teachers, by prohibiting as much as possible under the policy, while if something turns out right, the policy gets ignored.
I applaud your well thought out, articulate reply.
Well, I would, if your reply didn't amount to "Is not!"...
It's been a long time.
The same thing happened at my school. Except instead of the teacher being a lesbian she was accused of being a crackhead. The student eventually lost and was banned from the internet for 6 months plus he had community service.
I think a bigger question would be, what have (or had) the parents already done? If their kids are, in fact, running amock without guidance or any supervision/disclipine, then I'd say a nice fine would be a good way to disclipline bad parents. If the parents were in fact taking steps and they weren't working at the time (but they were trying to find a solution), then it's bad enough that they have uncontrollable assholes for kids, but slapping a fine or lawsuit on them is adding insult to injury.
I've seen many sides to this:
- Good parents, with good kids
- Not particularly good parents, but the kids turn out pretty good
- Parents that try hard but have kids who are sneaky, clever, and manage to get into trouble anyhow
- Parents with kids who are borderline psychotic... I've seen parents afraid of their offspring, and they weren't bad parents (sometimes I suppose you just get bad gene mixing)
- Parents that are bad, that have kids that are bad
- Parents that believe their kids are good, could do no wrong, and are pretty much self-delusional
- Parents that are stuggling to support themselves and their kids, and just lack the time/energy for proper supervision (single parents, etc)
- Parents that have a good kid who went bad due to a bad decision, peer pressure, or whatever. Drugs can drag somebody down pretty quick
- Hormones, some people/kids change rather quickly
- Parents that have one good child and one bad (or several of either/both), without apparent reason
As per my usual comment, I work in schools, so I tend to see a lot of kids, teachers, and parents. Some kids are just uneducated in certain ways, but otherwise good (I heard one using a nasty racial slur, but he was very embarrased when he found out what it meant). There are also parents who are jerks... they're the ones that park in the loading zones, bus loops, or whatever, cussing and behaving like morons in front of all the students, and generally think that the earth revolves around them and their offspring (until they get home, and then it's just them).
I can't say what the solution is in this case, and neither can anyone here who doesn't know the parents, kid, and others involved. Life's unpredictable, and who's to say what the full situation is. But I think that the "could YOUR mother do it" is a very fair comment, and a rather insightful one on the part of the attorney. The other comment would be "did the parents even try," which can be pretty hard to determine, but hopefully will come out in the end.
I've noticed a number of people complaining that a parent can't possibly police his or her child 100% of the time. As a parent with only one child, I can tell you that this is pretty much true. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for you, I am also 100% responsible for what my child does until he or she becomes an adult (18).
Look at it this way: if my daughter spray paints your house, breaks all your windows, and writes "Dirty Slut!" on your garage door, who do you think pays for that? While my daughter would probably spend some time in community service--which is exactly what these kids should do, probably related to gay rights or antidefamation--the parents should be held financially responsible for restoring this woman's good name, including monetary reward for pain and suffering. It sounds like it's more than just calling her a lesbian online, but disparaging her reputation and putting her name and picture out there when she did not want nor ask for that publicity.
In any case, these kids are just mean little bastards, and if the parents aren't going to take responsibility for them, they should at least reimburse society for having to do it for them.
Would you punish a glassblower who sells bottles because people use them to make Molotov cocktails?
Would you punish the postal service because somebody sent defaming letters?
Would you punish Adobe because a terrorist organisation found it easy to use Photoshop to make its propaganda?
MySpace is a container, a nonjudgemental tool. It is similar to an arts and crafts workshop, where anybody can use the tools. The workshop managers can attempt to supervise and prevent abuse of their "equipment" and their "display cases", but even in the real world supervisors can't be everywhere.