They think this kid is a threat. They jumped to the false conclusion that he was ready to shoot the school up. They think he threatened another Columbine (read what he wrote: it's an easy mistake to make.)
My guess is this kid is already desperately antisocial and seems unbalanced (lots of kids who aren't unbalanced seem like they are when they're teenagers trying to fight the man.) My guess is one of his teachers thinks he's the next Son of Sam, and was watching his blog because other school kids who've murdered have posted on the net too.
And when he wrote what he wrote, that teacher thought they were seeing the last-chance red flag, and acted. Honestly, I think the teacher had the right idea, and the wrong person. They're a good person trying to do the right thing, but they're also a total douchebag. We've all had this kind of teacher. Mine was an art teacher. Every goth in school she thought was sacrificing rodents in the bathroom, and she watched them like a hawk.
Was she right to do so? Sorta. The thing is, there really are dangerous kids out there, and some people really can tell who they are. Douchebags have a tendency to believe they are those people, when in fact they are not. Is it right to watch a kid who's a threat? Hell yes: watching them isn't actually a problem. Is acting on a threat the right thing to do? Yes: several Columbine-like incidents were prevented after that shooting by vigilant people who knew that one child had real problems.
But, a lot more kids were and always have been watched this way too. I was one of them. I never shot anyone with anything worse than a rubber band (though in terms of rubber bands I'm pretty much a mass murderer myself.) That said, I think the teachers were right to watch me, not because I was a threat, but because they thought I was.
Does that sound weird? Maybe, but it's a question of perspective. I was blessed with the good kind of douchebag teacher. (Yes, there are good ones and bad ones.) The good kind of douchebag teacher knows that they have to read all the way through the post before deciding it's a threat, because kids suck at writing and don't hedge well at all. I wrote something way back in the day that I could see a douchebag reading as a threat, myself, and I hadn't intended it either.
The reason my douchebags were good douchebags was that they read all of what I wrote, and realized it was just me being a bad writer rather than me giving off warning signs. One of them even came to me and explained that if someone misread what I was saying, yadda yadda yadda.
This kid has a bad douchebag. And, you know, that person's trying to do the right thing. They really believed this kid was going to bust out an AK and ventilate his peers. If that was true, then what they did would have been exactly correct: get him away from these kids while you work on getting him help. Unfortunately, because this kid's douchebag teacher was a bad douchebag teacher, they jumped to conclusions, and the wrong thing happened.
Hanlon's Razor, a correlary to Finnegan's Law and Occam's Razor, states to never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. This is essentially a truism of the human condition: the vast bulk of us mean well and just suck at life. We're good, dumb people. Once you come to accept that deeply, the world becomes a less horrible and more disappointing place.
These parents were trying to do the right thing; they're just idiots. Don't hate them. Pity them. They want to protect their kid, they're putting in effort to try to protect their kid, except they screwed up, hurt someone else's kid, didn't protect anything, and caused a huge mess in the process. They aren't evil oppressive monsters trying to destroy the first amendment and censor some innocent child. They're a bunch of screwups who saw a kid with normal teenage angst and a really bad set of writing skills say something dumb, misinterpreted it as a threat, and overreacted at the speed of sound.
If you understand the problem, it's easier to fix.
I really wonder what the discussion was like at the school board meeting. It's like: Hey, we can't let this guy get away with calling us bullies. What should we do about it? Hmmm, lets threaten to expell him.
More like "Hey, this kid says he feels bullied and Columbine happened because students felt bullied. What do we do?" "Well I don't want him around my kid, he's too big a risk, expel him."
At least make an attempt to understand why the people did what they did.
Schools *MUST* be bound by the bill of rights including the right to free speech.
Why hasn't anyone read the article?:(
This has nothing to do with free speech at all. The school isn't attempting to curtail the kid because of criticism; that's just how people have decided to invent the school's intent. If you actually bother to read up on why they did what they did, you get a whole different view of the situation.
The school mistakenly believes the kid threatened to murder other children. First he talks about feeling bullied, then later he talks about how Columbine happened because other kids felt bullied. If you see that and start acting, you might miss the vague sentence later on where he tries to express that he's not actually making a threat by saying he never has.
This is an easy mistake to make, if you actually read what the kid wrote, especially if you know the kid and if he's a troublemaker who seems emotionally disturbed (I don't know that that's actually the case here, but to read what he wrote, I suspect he has the sort of personality where people will believe that even if it's not true.)
The fact of the matter is, if you don't read carefully, it looks like he's saying he's going to go in and shoot up the school. He's an angry teenager who chose a very dumb metaphor to explain the depth of his grief, and whose writing skills are so low that where he later tries to explain that he's not making a threat, it's really not that obvious.
He's a bad writer, the principal is a bad reader, and the school board, made up of parents, are trying to expel him before he kills someone.
It's a gigantic misunderstanding based around asshole behavior from all directions, which has led to a set of bad beliefs which were acted on correctly. If he really had threatened to shoot up the school, expulsion would be exactly the right thing to do, because the next step would be to prevent him from getting into another school.
It's not the school or the school board at fault. It's the person who told the school and the school board - unfortunately nobody says who that was - that the kid had made a threat he really didn't make.
And, in the end, it's the kid's fault for talking about Columbine and being a bad writer. Yes, yes, the school is meant to be held to a higher standard, they should have checked more carefully, they should have asked a lawyer, that's all true. But this whole thing happened because one asshole kid used a tragedy to inflate up his personal sense of grief, and sucked too badly with a word processor to even say "I'm not threatening you."
Lots of people have done their own individual wrong, but let us not lose sight of the fact that this kid is a sanctimonious douchebag with delusions of persecution. Yes, he might be actually being persecuted, but to read what he's writing you'd think he was in Guantanamo Bay. And frankly, it doesn't matter if everything he's saying is true: the way he says it still makes me want to punch him in the throat.
Down with the school for not checking, down with the school board for acting on emotion instead of knowledge, down with the person who said it was a threat for being a judgemental horse's ass. But most importantly, down with that kid for using someone else's tragedy to seem to suffer. That's just disgusting.
The difference is that, in general, the corporate world is allowed to throw you out on your ass for whatever reason they feel like. But a public school, as a government institution, must conform to the rights granted by the Constitution - which in this case means protecting this student's freedom of speech, as long as said speech doesn't impair the ability of students at the school to learn.
Didn't read the article, huh?
The school is reacting to what it mistakenly believes is a threat. The kid talks about how he feels bullied, then talks about how Columbine happened because those kids felt bullied too. It's an easy mistake to make. This has nothing to do with free speech or governmental obligation. This is a bunch of scared parents who think Little Timmy's about to shoot up the place, and who are trying to get him away from their children.
Put down the drama stick and try reading what's actually going on.
I think you didn't read the article. The school is reacting to what it mistakenly believes is a threat to shoot other school children. It has nothing to do with power or freedom of speech. The kid says he feels bullied and then talks about how Columbine happened because kids felt bullied.
True, he's not making a threat, but it's an easy mistake to make.
Next time learn what's going on before talking about it.
What is it with Americans and expulsion? Here in Australia if someone gets expelled it is because they have done something absolutely crazy that in America probably would have them in prison or something like that, e.g. bashing up other students.
Here the problem is Slashdot, not America. Slashdot has attempted to turn this into a freedom of speech issue. It isn't.
The real problem is that the way the kid wrote what he wrote, it's very easy to mistake it as a threat to murder other school children. The kid says he feels bullied, and later he says Columbine happened because kids felt bullied. Now, the kid isn't actually making a threat, and afterwards he does even repeat it, but if you're an adult with a predisposition to worrying about this kid's behavior (which given the post seems likely) and you get to that part, you're likely to stop reading there and start acting.
Yes, the school is in the wrong, but it's not a freedom of speech issue at all. The school's wrong because it thinks what this kid did was to threaten to come into school and shoot the place up.
And frankly, the kid earned it by writing what he did. Alluding to Columbine is just goddamned stupid. That's like being angry at the President and trying to say that you have the same feelings as did the people who led up to 9/11. Sure, you're not saying you're gonna blow up a building, but that kind of ridiculous character attack and the possible underlying threat really earn you the grief you get as a result.
As angry as I am at the school system's people for being so dense as to make the mistake about what this kid is saying, I think we need to be equally angry at the kid for comparing himself to being a Columbine kid and then acting like he wasn't saying anything particularly bad. Yes, the school system is in the wrong here, not the kid. But the kid's still an asshole, and we can't go around telling him it's okay to make comments like that - whereas in the eyes of the law it is, in the eyes of simple social behavior it most certainly is not.
Yes, the punishment he deserves isn't being expelled; it's being ostracised. But, he most certainly deserves the ostracism.
Be it state, federal, or local, the government should not be punishing him for free speech, on his own time, off school property. Unless he is threatening (or libel/slandering, but that's a whole different debate), they are completely out of line. Period.
Have you actually read what he wrote? Whereas it's not threatening, it can be easily and understandably misread as a direct threat. The kid says he's feeling bullied, and later he says the reason Columbine happened was because those kids felt bullied.
Yes, he does later say that he's never made a threat, and yes, in a cold reading it's clear that this kid isn't threatening. However, the way he wrote it was particularly ill-considered, and it's quite easy for someone to take what he wrote as a threat. Furthermore, he doesn't make clear that he's not threatening until after the sentence about Columbine; if someone stopped reading there and immediately went to act, they wouldn't get the clarification.
The school isn't attempting to curtail him for criticism. Read their action - they think they're acting against a threat. Yes, they're wrong, but not for the reasons you think they are.
I didn't read TFA, because, well, this story is nothing new
You should have, because it's not what you expected at all. In general, if you're not going to read what's happening, don't criticise it, because you're more likely to be wrong, like here, than not.
However, repeatedly upheld precedent states that the governmental institution in question is the school system, not one particular school. As long as there is a school provided by the school system for that child, then this school is in fact well within its rights to wash its hands of him. The government is required to school the child. The government is not required to school the child at one particular location.
This is leveraged frequently to break up groups of children who have a history as violent troublemakers when a principal believes they're colluding to do future bad things. I came from the second high school in the country to have permanent metal detectors, and I've seen a lot of people sue and lose over this. The interesting exception was in the case of one particular malcontent who'd already been expelled from everywhere else; suddenly my highschool was unable to expel him simply because there wasn't another school to take over for him. (Eventually they actually sued one of his other schools at which he'd done nothing wrong to let him back in, because he had done things wrong at my school, and won.)
Such a "contract" would be as illegal as the paper that it was written on.
1) That's not a contract, it's an agreement. They're very different things in the eyes of the law. 2) There is nothing illegal about such an agreement, and that agreement is binding. The only agreements and contracts which are invalid are those signed under duress, those signed by people unable to represent themselves such as unemancipated minors, and those contracts which require the signator to do something illegal.
Be very careful about the wording of #2. That doesn't say "those which require someone to do something that the law does not allow without an agreement." For example, I can happily sign an agreement with you such that neither of us wear green clothes which has a monetary penalty clause. Assuming the contract is signed by competant individuals outside of duress, then whichever of us first wears green clothes is liable for that penalty. It doesn't matter that a school can't expel us for wearing green clothes; we've entered into a binding agreement.
The thing that's actually actionable here is that the school requires the agreement for acceptance, and that the clause regards someone's fundamental rights. Mind you, this sort of clause is actually common in the real world; one place where Slashdot is quite used to the idea is in the communication clause of a noncompete contract. If you work for WidgetInc, you can't give any tech advice to CommonControlCorp for a year, that sort of thing. The courts uphold specific obligations to personal topical censorship all the time.
The problem is that the school district requires the students to sign the agreement. THAT is illegal. You cannot require someone who is already a member of a public service to sign an agreement to remain a member. (You can if it's a private service.) Furthermore, you can only require someone to sign an agreement to use a public service if there is another equivalent public service within reasonable availability to the person. That's how magnet schools add restrictions like dress code and behavior code to their system: if the kid doesn't want to sign the agreement, they're welcome to go to the normal public school.
The issue, in the eyes of the court, is simply whether a person dependant on a public service has the option to use a public service without entering into agreements which they don't want. As long as there's one public school available to a kid which doesn't have asinine agreements, the others can require things like that all they want. They cannot, however, require that of their existing students; only their new ones.
What the school is doing here isn't actually to curtail the student's rights at all. It's a misguided attempt at self protection. The school wants legal leeway so that if they see something they think but cannot legally prove is a threat, that they can act on it without getting bent over a crate. This is a common fear in current school systems, and principals ignorant of the law are frequently doing this believing they're acting in the best interest of the school's ability to keep itself safe. Were it not for the disasterous results of their misapplication, they'd actually be doing an admirable thing.
The principals, unfortunately, are not apparently aware that they are able to expel a kid simply because they believe the kid is a threat. (Go ask a lawyer - it's true.) Once someone knows that, then this agreement becomes a horrible after-effect of the glad-handed attempt to seal the school up from liability. This sort of behavior is common in leadership which is more interested in being safe from liability than being safe from legitimate liability. The latter stance is important, but requires clueful legal counsel - something most public schools don't have.
Be less angry at the school board. They're trying to do the right thing. They just don't know how. Instead of telling them how awful they are, gently and kindly explain why what they're doin
They (banks, insurance companies etc) take money from the poor by raising high interest on loans etc, making the rich richer and the poor poorer- effectively *causing* poverty.
Oh, horseshit. Time and time again university studies have shown that the two primary causes of poverty are the lack of a local healthy market economy and saving habits. Furthermore, statistics show that poor people almost never get loans, because the banks know they're not getting paid back. If you honestly believe a bank wants to make a loan to a risk candidate like a poor person, I suggest you call a bank, pretend to be a poor person, and try to talk them into a loan. (Call the bank manager first, and tell them you're from a newspaper and you need to know the effects of being poor on getting a loan. They'll set up everything you need to temporarily dodge things like credit checks.)
Public schools in America = lowest quality education you can possibly get for your child.
Actually, studies show that when you rank private and public schools by funds available to students, public school children perform significantly better. The supposition is that the quality of education is equivalent, and that the students are benefitting from the larger average count of other student minds.
The primary problem with public schools is underfunding. If you don't like it, talk to your senator, the other parents in the district and the local superintendant. Lord knows I did.
No, you can't. That's slander. The pervasive myth that once you're off of school grounds you may say whatever you want is nonsense.
Don't get me wrong - the kid hasn't done anything wrong. However, that's because the kid hasn't committed slander. He talked about his feelings of being threatened; there is nothing actionable in that. However, stating someone's political affiliations, especially with something as charged as the Nazi party, is slander, and slander most certainly is illegal, even in one's home, even among one's friends. (In fact, there are even cases where burning a religious or political symbol into someone's lawn have been held as libel; the most famous is RAV vs. City of St. Paul.)
Why? The public school system is obliged to continue to school him, and there's no shortage of small companies run by people angry at the man who'll say "omg I can't believe they screwed you, I will so hire you." Liberal politically oriented colleges like Oberlin, Amherst and Penn State will be all over this kid. By the time he's got one good job under his belt, nobody's even going to notice. Most people don't even put their education on their resumes.
Don't get me wrong, this is a bump in the road. But the end of it? Hardly.
To be clear, tortuous offenses are actually the domain of everyone. In theory, if Party A slanders Party B, I may sue on B's behalf. (Me personally, I'm too lazy.) That said, in theory someone could have sued this kid from Texas, if they believed there was a case. You see this sort of thing happen in human rights cases a lot, and this is a common mechanism by which the ACLU, SPLC and EFF get themselves involved.
FWI, you can't be found guilty of any of these things unless the other party proves they were somehow harmed by the slander or liable speech.
Uh. This just isn't true. Libel does not require actual damages at all. (Slander does.) If I get up on a newspaper opinion poll and write about how much I think (insert politician here) is a (insult horrible lie here,) and it turns out I'm writing for a newspaper with 0 readers, I have still incorrectly defamed his character and I'm still liable for libel. (By the way, liable means "I am responsible for the outcome of these actions." There is no such thing as "liable speech." It's called libel. Please don't comment on the nature of a five letter law you can't even spell.) Libel requires only that the medium of conversation is lasting, which implies writing and covers well the internet.
In fact, if what the kid says is false, then this is the textbook definition of libel.
If they can't prove it, you can still say it, even though its not true.
Did you know that giving false legal advice is a felony?
I believe most conspircy laws state that you must go beyond talking; you actually have to take some step to executing your conspircy.
Again, nonsense.
If the feds get a wiretap warrant, and they hear you, Vinny and Guido (I'm sick of the terrorist metaphors; let's go back to the old trusty Italian Mob) plotting to knock over a bank, that's a conspiracy. The federal government is under no obligation to wait until you go bust out the guns; once there's intent, and once it can be established that what was being discussed wasn't humor or speculation, then it's real enough to be actionable (in practical terms, this involves agreeing to act at a specific time, date and on a specific location or target.)
Search Wikipedia for this; there are some interesting facts.
Here's a better thought: stop searching a community-written site for detail-oriented things like legal advice. There is no shortage of legitimate, correct and well-thought-out material on sites like law.cornell.edu, and there is no shortage of examples - particularly in law, but also elsewhere - of Wikipedia being essentially full of crap. By and on the whole, it's a fine, high accuracy reference, but it simply does not have the level of quality control to be used as a legal reference.
FWIW, it shouldn't be the act of yelling fire that should be illegal; causing panic, wasting emergency responders' time, etc. is what should be illegal.
Uh. The actual yelling of fire isn't what's illegal, it's the attempt to cause panic. Exactly what are you arguing with here?
I know, I'm splitting hairs, but I think its important to make the distinction so we don't undermine the right to free speech.
Yeah, welcome to 1904. The issue of intent as regards the nature of protection of free speech has been well settled in this country for more than a hundred years. Read a law book; I am not a lawyer, but I believe the appropriate precedent is the supreme court case Aikens v. State of Wisconsin (c194-195 1904.) Just because you can come up with a possible mistake doesn't mean the court hasn't long since handled it. Moreover, the hair you're attempting to split isn't at all germane in context.
Clarance Darrow you are not.
Moderators, remember the golden rule of moderation: do not mark something as insightful if you yourself cannot verify something as correct. Meta-moderators, unleash the hounds.
I'm certainly not defending this school; I think the superintendant of schools in New Jersey would be an asshole to not start handing out pink slips today. However:
As the other replier to your post has mentioned, the school should not have any control on your actions OUTSIDE of school.
Not only is this not true, but it's also disingenuous. To begin with, what the kid did was effectively not actually outside of the school; it directly related the school and actions inside of it. That the actual work wasn't done on school grounds is immaterial; it was about the school. The analogue to this thirty years ago would be this kid walking around putting flyers under the doors of everyone in the district talking about the issue. (Please remember that a blog is public, and so there's no issue of privacy, range of intent, or who he was trying to talk to. Maybe the better example is the town bulletin board.)
That said, it doesn't actually have to be about the school. As a crass example, if the school saw videotaped evidence of the kid involved in a violent, weapons-based hold up of a store, or perhaps a hand-to-hand beating to death of some other kid over race or sexual orientation (this really happens in certain midwest states,) and were I a parent in the district, I would not only expect an expulsion but I'd go to court to force it.
Can any of you older men/women actually sit there and imagine doing something at home outside of school time, and then getting in trouble for it in school [...] ?
Absolutely. If there was a VHS tape of me being a crack dealer, I should expect those school doors to be closed to me permanently. What I cannot fathom is the idea that open criticism is an actual offense, much less that he's being unfairly punished for saying he'd been unfairly punished.
Yes, there is a distinctly evil circus theme going on here; I can hear the out-of-tune calliope and the evil cackling. It has nothing to do with from where he made the blog post, though.
Why do schools sit there and try to claim "Its not our jobs, its the parents job" when at the very same time they are going to reach into the home and bypass the parents for something so innocuous as this?... They can't have it both ways.
This is a straw man. You cannot claim incongruity between this school's actions and some hypothetical other school's actions. Besides, from the sound of it, there isn't much a lack to complain about as regards this school.
Um, no. That is NOT what I said. I said that the sale could be invalidated when the offered price was CLEARLY in error.
If you take the time to read what you said, you'll discover that in fact you made no such restraint on who could claim an invalidated sale, allcaps notwithstanding.
I said NOTHING about offers where the existence of the error was not clear.
You said nothing about the clarity of the error at all. If you're going to protest that someone is rebutting something you didn't say, at least have the decency to reread your own statement first, to check that in fact you didn't forget to make some admonition you'd intended to make. Believe it or not, even you make mistakes.
If you, through an inadvertent error, offer $1000 for a $10 CD (we will ignore the special case of collector's items, out-of-print albums, etc.), you most certainly CAN repudiate the contract. In fact, a missing decimal point is a classic example of a "unilateral mistake of fact".
Yes, yes, you're not actually countermanding me. What you've done here is to presuppose that you were referring to a case wherein the mistake was documented, where in fact you'd said no such thing. Furthermore, if you'll now take the added measure of reading what I said, you'll discover that in fact I agree that such a thing is possible - if and only if there is concrete evidence of the error, the thing you're now claiming to have said but in fact had not.
Funny how you're now telling me you actually had said the only thing I criticised, and that what I said as a result of your having supposedly covered the material I suggested was in error is now redundant and in error.
For a contract to be complete, there MUST be a "meeting of the minds".
If you're using that phrase because the technical phrase is over most people's heads, bravo; few people are willing to step away from as tempting an authoritarian sounding phrase as consensus ad idem. However, if we're going to discuss contract law, given that there are legitimate and important variations on the theme such as mutual assent, derivative assent and assumed participation, I suggest we switch to the appropriate technical terminology.
That said, this isn't actually the case. Ad idem is only required in the case of unique contracts. In fact, in the case at hand it's not nessecary. However, I'll give a similar example as effort to draw parallel. I believe that telecommunications firms are going to provide me a close enough analogue to get some serious mileage, so I'll refer to America Online's contracts. Say what you will about their service, but AOL has some of the best and most diligent lawyers in the business.
AOL's contract requires no ad idem. AOL has a standard issue binding offerage, and in any case when a user accepts service from AOL, as long as AOL verifies that the user is aware of the binding offerage, then that is considered assent and the user may continue. This is not consensus ad idem. (I'll assume you're telling the truth when intimating a legal background; however for the help of external readers it's important to point out that this is something law websites get wrong on a regular basis, and is one of the primary examples of why the address of one's law school should start with a street number and not "www.".) This is, as you know, called assumed participation in American law (there's a different name in British law, but I'll be damned if I can remember it.) The participation is assumed on AOL's part because they offer the contract in the first place, and so it can be assumed that anyone meeting the contract's requirements and accepting its terms has entered into a binding agreement with AOL.
This is importantly different than ad idem because there are cases where they're interpreted differently. Though a rarity, we're seeing lots o
It is like those EULA's what some company lawyer writes down is worth jackshit. If the judge in this case decides that Linden Labs has a case to answer they can take their agreement and shove it where the sun don't shine.
This isn't TV. Judges can't just decide to overturn licenses. There has to be a specific, defensible legal reason to overturn the license, and if there isn't, the licensor can just take it to be appealed. If a judge has a history of overturned rulings, they get censured, and eventually lose their bench seat. We're not in some kind of weird judicial oligarchy here. There are actual rules, and the judges are expected to abide by them.
If, on the other hand, you believe that there's a flaw in the license, please feel free to be specific. Given that that's essentially verbatim the set of clauses that the telecommunications industry has used successfully in case after case of shutting down spammers and network abusers, I think you'll find there's enough precedent that Linden is essentially iron-clad.
But Linden Labs have created a world where customers (not LL) own their personal content, and by implication they have independent lives and livelihoods and businesses etc etc. To cut off Bragg from his possessions, his virtual life, his livelihood and businesses was not only inappropriate, it was totally underhand and almost evil. They unilaterally executed this virtual person (I'm serious), without due process in-world nor any opportunity for defense.
Nonsense. This guy made an attempt to contravene the system. The license says "if you attempt to contravene the system, you will be cut off." He's a lawyer. He knew perfectly well what that agreement meant when he signed up to it.
There is no point at which someone who falls into proscribed punishments they've already agreed to because of an attempt to defraud other customers can be considered "evil." They're protecting their other customers, plain and simple. If he got a slap on the wrist, he'd just try other scams, and they have a responsibility to display to their customers that the customers are being protected.
Over and over and over again the Linden Labs license goes into how none of the stuff they sell - not the Linden Dollars, not the land, nothing - has any real value. Period. It's in the license. It doesn't matter what people decide it's worth, what they'll pay one another for it, none of it. That's not a real economy, no matter how much it acts like one, and no matter how much people want to pretend that means it is one. There's a very specific meaning to real value. If there was real value, they'd have to protect it. Because there isn't real value, they can't sell it directly. There was a long and interesting talk on exactly this at E3 this year; if you'd like to actually understand how the industry works, you should join us.
There is no real value here, and he agreed to a license that says "if you try to steal from us or the other customers, you're shut off, period." Exactly where do you think Linden has crossed the line? Do you actually believe that a lawyer shouldn't be expected to be bound by a license they agreed to when being punished for an obvious scam?
Nope. Linden Labs can take the property back, no problem, or at least have the virtual "contract" voided. This is because there was no "meeting of the minds" when the contract was executed. If I, by mistake, offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, when really I left out the decimal point and meant to offer $10.00, there is no obligation for me to actually pay that much money for something clearly worth much less.
They go over this in Business Law 101.
This is a dangerous and misleading reduction of the truth. In order to redact one's claim, one must have evidence that such a claim was unintentional. If you offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, and enter into a binding contract or exchange currency, that's just final, period. If you offer $10 in email, then accidentally leave the decimal out in an electronic transfer, then you can fall back on the email, claim that the deal was made in good faith at the lower amount, et cetera.
However, what you're suggesting amounts to carte blance for buyer's remorse, and that's just not the case. You can't just up and decide "oh, well, I didn't really mean what I told you I meant in writing, and handed over the receipt for." If there's a standard price like a blue book value, if there's a prior agreement, if there's a repeating price such as for a service which was accidentally renegotiated, sure, those things can be overturned.
But you can't buy something from me then come back two days later like "I wrote the number down wrong, nevermind, give me my money back." If that's what your college told you, then go to your college and try it with them. Be sure to protest with your professor's name as they laugh you out of the bursar's office and back into the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
They think this kid is a threat. They jumped to the false conclusion that he was ready to shoot the school up. They think he threatened another Columbine (read what he wrote: it's an easy mistake to make.)
My guess is this kid is already desperately antisocial and seems unbalanced (lots of kids who aren't unbalanced seem like they are when they're teenagers trying to fight the man.) My guess is one of his teachers thinks he's the next Son of Sam, and was watching his blog because other school kids who've murdered have posted on the net too.
And when he wrote what he wrote, that teacher thought they were seeing the last-chance red flag, and acted. Honestly, I think the teacher had the right idea, and the wrong person. They're a good person trying to do the right thing, but they're also a total douchebag. We've all had this kind of teacher. Mine was an art teacher. Every goth in school she thought was sacrificing rodents in the bathroom, and she watched them like a hawk.
Was she right to do so? Sorta. The thing is, there really are dangerous kids out there, and some people really can tell who they are. Douchebags have a tendency to believe they are those people, when in fact they are not. Is it right to watch a kid who's a threat? Hell yes: watching them isn't actually a problem. Is acting on a threat the right thing to do? Yes: several Columbine-like incidents were prevented after that shooting by vigilant people who knew that one child had real problems.
But, a lot more kids were and always have been watched this way too. I was one of them. I never shot anyone with anything worse than a rubber band (though in terms of rubber bands I'm pretty much a mass murderer myself.) That said, I think the teachers were right to watch me, not because I was a threat, but because they thought I was.
Does that sound weird? Maybe, but it's a question of perspective. I was blessed with the good kind of douchebag teacher. (Yes, there are good ones and bad ones.) The good kind of douchebag teacher knows that they have to read all the way through the post before deciding it's a threat, because kids suck at writing and don't hedge well at all. I wrote something way back in the day that I could see a douchebag reading as a threat, myself, and I hadn't intended it either.
The reason my douchebags were good douchebags was that they read all of what I wrote, and realized it was just me being a bad writer rather than me giving off warning signs. One of them even came to me and explained that if someone misread what I was saying, yadda yadda yadda.
This kid has a bad douchebag. And, you know, that person's trying to do the right thing. They really believed this kid was going to bust out an AK and ventilate his peers. If that was true, then what they did would have been exactly correct: get him away from these kids while you work on getting him help. Unfortunately, because this kid's douchebag teacher was a bad douchebag teacher, they jumped to conclusions, and the wrong thing happened.
Hanlon's Razor, a correlary to Finnegan's Law and Occam's Razor, states to never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. This is essentially a truism of the human condition: the vast bulk of us mean well and just suck at life. We're good, dumb people. Once you come to accept that deeply, the world becomes a less horrible and more disappointing place.
These parents were trying to do the right thing; they're just idiots. Don't hate them. Pity them. They want to protect their kid, they're putting in effort to try to protect their kid, except they screwed up, hurt someone else's kid, didn't protect anything, and caused a huge mess in the process. They aren't evil oppressive monsters trying to destroy the first amendment and censor some innocent child. They're a bunch of screwups who saw a kid with normal teenage angst and a really bad set of writing skills say something dumb, misinterpreted it as a threat, and overreacted at the speed of sound.
If you understand the problem, it's easier to fix.
I really wonder what the discussion was like at the school board meeting. It's like: Hey, we can't let this guy get away with calling us bullies. What should we do about it? Hmmm, lets threaten to expell him.
More like "Hey, this kid says he feels bullied and Columbine happened because students felt bullied. What do we do?" "Well I don't want him around my kid, he's too big a risk, expel him."
At least make an attempt to understand why the people did what they did.
Schools *MUST* be bound by the bill of rights including the right to free speech.
:(
Why hasn't anyone read the article?
This has nothing to do with free speech at all. The school isn't attempting to curtail the kid because of criticism; that's just how people have decided to invent the school's intent. If you actually bother to read up on why they did what they did, you get a whole different view of the situation.
The school mistakenly believes the kid threatened to murder other children. First he talks about feeling bullied, then later he talks about how Columbine happened because other kids felt bullied. If you see that and start acting, you might miss the vague sentence later on where he tries to express that he's not actually making a threat by saying he never has.
This is an easy mistake to make, if you actually read what the kid wrote, especially if you know the kid and if he's a troublemaker who seems emotionally disturbed (I don't know that that's actually the case here, but to read what he wrote, I suspect he has the sort of personality where people will believe that even if it's not true.)
The fact of the matter is, if you don't read carefully, it looks like he's saying he's going to go in and shoot up the school. He's an angry teenager who chose a very dumb metaphor to explain the depth of his grief, and whose writing skills are so low that where he later tries to explain that he's not making a threat, it's really not that obvious.
He's a bad writer, the principal is a bad reader, and the school board, made up of parents, are trying to expel him before he kills someone.
It's a gigantic misunderstanding based around asshole behavior from all directions, which has led to a set of bad beliefs which were acted on correctly. If he really had threatened to shoot up the school, expulsion would be exactly the right thing to do, because the next step would be to prevent him from getting into another school.
It's not the school or the school board at fault. It's the person who told the school and the school board - unfortunately nobody says who that was - that the kid had made a threat he really didn't make.
And, in the end, it's the kid's fault for talking about Columbine and being a bad writer. Yes, yes, the school is meant to be held to a higher standard, they should have checked more carefully, they should have asked a lawyer, that's all true. But this whole thing happened because one asshole kid used a tragedy to inflate up his personal sense of grief, and sucked too badly with a word processor to even say "I'm not threatening you."
Lots of people have done their own individual wrong, but let us not lose sight of the fact that this kid is a sanctimonious douchebag with delusions of persecution. Yes, he might be actually being persecuted, but to read what he's writing you'd think he was in Guantanamo Bay. And frankly, it doesn't matter if everything he's saying is true: the way he says it still makes me want to punch him in the throat.
Down with the school for not checking, down with the school board for acting on emotion instead of knowledge, down with the person who said it was a threat for being a judgemental horse's ass. But most importantly, down with that kid for using someone else's tragedy to seem to suffer. That's just disgusting.
The difference is that, in general, the corporate world is allowed to throw you out on your ass for whatever reason they feel like. But a public school, as a government institution, must conform to the rights granted by the Constitution - which in this case means protecting this student's freedom of speech, as long as said speech doesn't impair the ability of students at the school to learn.
Didn't read the article, huh?
The school is reacting to what it mistakenly believes is a threat. The kid talks about how he feels bullied, then talks about how Columbine happened because those kids felt bullied too. It's an easy mistake to make. This has nothing to do with free speech or governmental obligation. This is a bunch of scared parents who think Little Timmy's about to shoot up the place, and who are trying to get him away from their children.
Put down the drama stick and try reading what's actually going on.
I think the problem here is power.
I think you didn't read the article. The school is reacting to what it mistakenly believes is a threat to shoot other school children. It has nothing to do with power or freedom of speech. The kid says he feels bullied and then talks about how Columbine happened because kids felt bullied.
True, he's not making a threat, but it's an easy mistake to make.
Next time learn what's going on before talking about it.
What is it with Americans and expulsion? Here in Australia if someone gets expelled it is because they have done something absolutely crazy that in America probably would have them in prison or something like that, e.g. bashing up other students.
Here the problem is Slashdot, not America. Slashdot has attempted to turn this into a freedom of speech issue. It isn't.
The real problem is that the way the kid wrote what he wrote, it's very easy to mistake it as a threat to murder other school children. The kid says he feels bullied, and later he says Columbine happened because kids felt bullied. Now, the kid isn't actually making a threat, and afterwards he does even repeat it, but if you're an adult with a predisposition to worrying about this kid's behavior (which given the post seems likely) and you get to that part, you're likely to stop reading there and start acting.
Yes, the school is in the wrong, but it's not a freedom of speech issue at all. The school's wrong because it thinks what this kid did was to threaten to come into school and shoot the place up.
And frankly, the kid earned it by writing what he did. Alluding to Columbine is just goddamned stupid. That's like being angry at the President and trying to say that you have the same feelings as did the people who led up to 9/11. Sure, you're not saying you're gonna blow up a building, but that kind of ridiculous character attack and the possible underlying threat really earn you the grief you get as a result.
As angry as I am at the school system's people for being so dense as to make the mistake about what this kid is saying, I think we need to be equally angry at the kid for comparing himself to being a Columbine kid and then acting like he wasn't saying anything particularly bad. Yes, the school system is in the wrong here, not the kid. But the kid's still an asshole, and we can't go around telling him it's okay to make comments like that - whereas in the eyes of the law it is, in the eyes of simple social behavior it most certainly is not.
Yes, the punishment he deserves isn't being expelled; it's being ostracised. But, he most certainly deserves the ostracism.
Be it state, federal, or local, the government should not be punishing him for free speech, on his own time, off school property. Unless he is threatening (or libel/slandering, but that's a whole different debate), they are completely out of line. Period.
Have you actually read what he wrote? Whereas it's not threatening, it can be easily and understandably misread as a direct threat. The kid says he's feeling bullied, and later he says the reason Columbine happened was because those kids felt bullied.
Yes, he does later say that he's never made a threat, and yes, in a cold reading it's clear that this kid isn't threatening. However, the way he wrote it was particularly ill-considered, and it's quite easy for someone to take what he wrote as a threat. Furthermore, he doesn't make clear that he's not threatening until after the sentence about Columbine; if someone stopped reading there and immediately went to act, they wouldn't get the clarification.
The school isn't attempting to curtail him for criticism. Read their action - they think they're acting against a threat. Yes, they're wrong, but not for the reasons you think they are.
I didn't read TFA, because, well, this story is nothing new
You should have, because it's not what you expected at all. In general, if you're not going to read what's happening, don't criticise it, because you're more likely to be wrong, like here, than not.
However, repeatedly upheld precedent states that the governmental institution in question is the school system, not one particular school. As long as there is a school provided by the school system for that child, then this school is in fact well within its rights to wash its hands of him. The government is required to school the child. The government is not required to school the child at one particular location.
This is leveraged frequently to break up groups of children who have a history as violent troublemakers when a principal believes they're colluding to do future bad things. I came from the second high school in the country to have permanent metal detectors, and I've seen a lot of people sue and lose over this. The interesting exception was in the case of one particular malcontent who'd already been expelled from everywhere else; suddenly my highschool was unable to expel him simply because there wasn't another school to take over for him. (Eventually they actually sued one of his other schools at which he'd done nothing wrong to let him back in, because he had done things wrong at my school, and won.)
Such a "contract" would be as illegal as the paper that it was written on.
1) That's not a contract, it's an agreement. They're very different things in the eyes of the law.
2) There is nothing illegal about such an agreement, and that agreement is binding. The only agreements and contracts which are invalid are those signed under duress, those signed by people unable to represent themselves such as unemancipated minors, and those contracts which require the signator to do something illegal.
Be very careful about the wording of #2. That doesn't say "those which require someone to do something that the law does not allow without an agreement." For example, I can happily sign an agreement with you such that neither of us wear green clothes which has a monetary penalty clause. Assuming the contract is signed by competant individuals outside of duress, then whichever of us first wears green clothes is liable for that penalty. It doesn't matter that a school can't expel us for wearing green clothes; we've entered into a binding agreement.
The thing that's actually actionable here is that the school requires the agreement for acceptance, and that the clause regards someone's fundamental rights. Mind you, this sort of clause is actually common in the real world; one place where Slashdot is quite used to the idea is in the communication clause of a noncompete contract. If you work for WidgetInc, you can't give any tech advice to CommonControlCorp for a year, that sort of thing. The courts uphold specific obligations to personal topical censorship all the time.
The problem is that the school district requires the students to sign the agreement. THAT is illegal. You cannot require someone who is already a member of a public service to sign an agreement to remain a member. (You can if it's a private service.) Furthermore, you can only require someone to sign an agreement to use a public service if there is another equivalent public service within reasonable availability to the person. That's how magnet schools add restrictions like dress code and behavior code to their system: if the kid doesn't want to sign the agreement, they're welcome to go to the normal public school.
The issue, in the eyes of the court, is simply whether a person dependant on a public service has the option to use a public service without entering into agreements which they don't want. As long as there's one public school available to a kid which doesn't have asinine agreements, the others can require things like that all they want. They cannot, however, require that of their existing students; only their new ones.
What the school is doing here isn't actually to curtail the student's rights at all. It's a misguided attempt at self protection. The school wants legal leeway so that if they see something they think but cannot legally prove is a threat, that they can act on it without getting bent over a crate. This is a common fear in current school systems, and principals ignorant of the law are frequently doing this believing they're acting in the best interest of the school's ability to keep itself safe. Were it not for the disasterous results of their misapplication, they'd actually be doing an admirable thing.
The principals, unfortunately, are not apparently aware that they are able to expel a kid simply because they believe the kid is a threat. (Go ask a lawyer - it's true.) Once someone knows that, then this agreement becomes a horrible after-effect of the glad-handed attempt to seal the school up from liability. This sort of behavior is common in leadership which is more interested in being safe from liability than being safe from legitimate liability. The latter stance is important, but requires clueful legal counsel - something most public schools don't have.
Be less angry at the school board. They're trying to do the right thing. They just don't know how. Instead of telling them how awful they are, gently and kindly explain why what they're doin
They (banks, insurance companies etc) take money from the poor by raising high interest on loans etc, making the rich richer and the poor poorer- effectively *causing* poverty.
Oh, horseshit. Time and time again university studies have shown that the two primary causes of poverty are the lack of a local healthy market economy and saving habits. Furthermore, statistics show that poor people almost never get loans, because the banks know they're not getting paid back. If you honestly believe a bank wants to make a loan to a risk candidate like a poor person, I suggest you call a bank, pretend to be a poor person, and try to talk them into a loan. (Call the bank manager first, and tell them you're from a newspaper and you need to know the effects of being poor on getting a loan. They'll set up everything you need to temporarily dodge things like credit checks.)
Public schools in America = lowest quality education you can possibly get for your child.
Actually, studies show that when you rank private and public schools by funds available to students, public school children perform significantly better. The supposition is that the quality of education is equivalent, and that the students are benefitting from the larger average count of other student minds.
The primary problem with public schools is underfunding. If you don't like it, talk to your senator, the other parents in the district and the local superintendant. Lord knows I did.
At home, you can call the president a Nazi.
No, you can't. That's slander. The pervasive myth that once you're off of school grounds you may say whatever you want is nonsense.
Don't get me wrong - the kid hasn't done anything wrong. However, that's because the kid hasn't committed slander. He talked about his feelings of being threatened; there is nothing actionable in that. However, stating someone's political affiliations, especially with something as charged as the Nazi party, is slander, and slander most certainly is illegal, even in one's home, even among one's friends. (In fact, there are even cases where burning a religious or political symbol into someone's lawn have been held as libel; the most famous is RAV vs. City of St. Paul.)
Why? The public school system is obliged to continue to school him, and there's no shortage of small companies run by people angry at the man who'll say "omg I can't believe they screwed you, I will so hire you." Liberal politically oriented colleges like Oberlin, Amherst and Penn State will be all over this kid. By the time he's got one good job under his belt, nobody's even going to notice. Most people don't even put their education on their resumes.
Don't get me wrong, this is a bump in the road. But the end of it? Hardly.
To be clear, tortuous offenses are actually the domain of everyone. In theory, if Party A slanders Party B, I may sue on B's behalf. (Me personally, I'm too lazy.) That said, in theory someone could have sued this kid from Texas, if they believed there was a case. You see this sort of thing happen in human rights cases a lot, and this is a common mechanism by which the ACLU, SPLC and EFF get themselves involved.
FWI, you can't be found guilty of any of these things unless the other party proves they were somehow harmed by the slander or liable speech.
Uh. This just isn't true. Libel does not require actual damages at all. (Slander does.) If I get up on a newspaper opinion poll and write about how much I think (insert politician here) is a (insult horrible lie here,) and it turns out I'm writing for a newspaper with 0 readers, I have still incorrectly defamed his character and I'm still liable for libel. (By the way, liable means "I am responsible for the outcome of these actions." There is no such thing as "liable speech." It's called libel. Please don't comment on the nature of a five letter law you can't even spell.) Libel requires only that the medium of conversation is lasting, which implies writing and covers well the internet.
In fact, if what the kid says is false, then this is the textbook definition of libel.
If they can't prove it, you can still say it, even though its not true.
Did you know that giving false legal advice is a felony?
I believe most conspircy laws state that you must go beyond talking; you actually have to take some step to executing your conspircy.
Again, nonsense.
If the feds get a wiretap warrant, and they hear you, Vinny and Guido (I'm sick of the terrorist metaphors; let's go back to the old trusty Italian Mob) plotting to knock over a bank, that's a conspiracy. The federal government is under no obligation to wait until you go bust out the guns; once there's intent, and once it can be established that what was being discussed wasn't humor or speculation, then it's real enough to be actionable (in practical terms, this involves agreeing to act at a specific time, date and on a specific location or target.)
Search Wikipedia for this; there are some interesting facts.
Here's a better thought: stop searching a community-written site for detail-oriented things like legal advice. There is no shortage of legitimate, correct and well-thought-out material on sites like law.cornell.edu, and there is no shortage of examples - particularly in law, but also elsewhere - of Wikipedia being essentially full of crap. By and on the whole, it's a fine, high accuracy reference, but it simply does not have the level of quality control to be used as a legal reference.
FWIW, it shouldn't be the act of yelling fire that should be illegal; causing panic, wasting emergency responders' time, etc. is what should be illegal.
Uh. The actual yelling of fire isn't what's illegal, it's the attempt to cause panic. Exactly what are you arguing with here?
I know, I'm splitting hairs, but I think its important to make the distinction so we don't undermine the right to free speech.
Yeah, welcome to 1904. The issue of intent as regards the nature of protection of free speech has been well settled in this country for more than a hundred years. Read a law book; I am not a lawyer, but I believe the appropriate precedent is the supreme court case Aikens v. State of Wisconsin (c194-195 1904.) Just because you can come up with a possible mistake doesn't mean the court hasn't long since handled it. Moreover, the hair you're attempting to split isn't at all germane in context.
Clarance Darrow you are not.
Moderators, remember the golden rule of moderation: do not mark something as insightful if you yourself cannot verify something as correct. Meta-moderators, unleash the hounds.
I'm certainly not defending this school; I think the superintendant of schools in New Jersey would be an asshole to not start handing out pink slips today. However:
... They can't have it both ways.
As the other replier to your post has mentioned, the school should not have any control on your actions OUTSIDE of school.
Not only is this not true, but it's also disingenuous. To begin with, what the kid did was effectively not actually outside of the school; it directly related the school and actions inside of it. That the actual work wasn't done on school grounds is immaterial; it was about the school. The analogue to this thirty years ago would be this kid walking around putting flyers under the doors of everyone in the district talking about the issue. (Please remember that a blog is public, and so there's no issue of privacy, range of intent, or who he was trying to talk to. Maybe the better example is the town bulletin board.)
That said, it doesn't actually have to be about the school. As a crass example, if the school saw videotaped evidence of the kid involved in a violent, weapons-based hold up of a store, or perhaps a hand-to-hand beating to death of some other kid over race or sexual orientation (this really happens in certain midwest states,) and were I a parent in the district, I would not only expect an expulsion but I'd go to court to force it.
Can any of you older men/women actually sit there and imagine doing something at home outside of school time, and then getting in trouble for it in school [...] ?
Absolutely. If there was a VHS tape of me being a crack dealer, I should expect those school doors to be closed to me permanently. What I cannot fathom is the idea that open criticism is an actual offense, much less that he's being unfairly punished for saying he'd been unfairly punished.
Yes, there is a distinctly evil circus theme going on here; I can hear the out-of-tune calliope and the evil cackling. It has nothing to do with from where he made the blog post, though.
Why do schools sit there and try to claim "Its not our jobs, its the parents job" when at the very same time they are going to reach into the home and bypass the parents for something so innocuous as this?
This is a straw man. You cannot claim incongruity between this school's actions and some hypothetical other school's actions. Besides, from the sound of it, there isn't much a lack to complain about as regards this school.
If you allow the system to fuck you based on an excuse, then not only have you earned the fucking, but you've fucked the rest of us as a result.
Well, at that point he should be thanking his school, because you're not getting irony either.
Repeat after me: Irony Is A Form Of Wordplay.
Yeah, like CDs, 3.5" disks, metal tape, DAT, and other Sony formats that Sony tried to keep rights to and therefore never took off.
Oh, wait.
in fact you made no such restraint
s/restraint/constraint/1. Sorry.
Um, no. That is NOT what I said. I said that the sale could be invalidated when the offered price was CLEARLY in error.
.) This is, as you know, called assumed participation in American law (there's a different name in British law, but I'll be damned if I can remember it.) The participation is assumed on AOL's part because they offer the contract in the first place, and so it can be assumed that anyone meeting the contract's requirements and accepting its terms has entered into a binding agreement with AOL.
If you take the time to read what you said, you'll discover that in fact you made no such restraint on who could claim an invalidated sale, allcaps notwithstanding.
I said NOTHING about offers where the existence of the error was not clear.
You said nothing about the clarity of the error at all. If you're going to protest that someone is rebutting something you didn't say, at least have the decency to reread your own statement first, to check that in fact you didn't forget to make some admonition you'd intended to make. Believe it or not, even you make mistakes.
If you, through an inadvertent error, offer $1000 for a $10 CD (we will ignore the special case of collector's items, out-of-print albums, etc.), you most certainly CAN repudiate the contract. In fact, a missing decimal point is a classic example of a "unilateral mistake of fact".
Yes, yes, you're not actually countermanding me. What you've done here is to presuppose that you were referring to a case wherein the mistake was documented, where in fact you'd said no such thing. Furthermore, if you'll now take the added measure of reading what I said, you'll discover that in fact I agree that such a thing is possible - if and only if there is concrete evidence of the error, the thing you're now claiming to have said but in fact had not.
Funny how you're now telling me you actually had said the only thing I criticised, and that what I said as a result of your having supposedly covered the material I suggested was in error is now redundant and in error.
For a contract to be complete, there MUST be a "meeting of the minds".
If you're using that phrase because the technical phrase is over most people's heads, bravo; few people are willing to step away from as tempting an authoritarian sounding phrase as consensus ad idem. However, if we're going to discuss contract law, given that there are legitimate and important variations on the theme such as mutual assent, derivative assent and assumed participation, I suggest we switch to the appropriate technical terminology.
That said, this isn't actually the case. Ad idem is only required in the case of unique contracts. In fact, in the case at hand it's not nessecary. However, I'll give a similar example as effort to draw parallel. I believe that telecommunications firms are going to provide me a close enough analogue to get some serious mileage, so I'll refer to America Online's contracts. Say what you will about their service, but AOL has some of the best and most diligent lawyers in the business.
AOL's contract requires no ad idem. AOL has a standard issue binding offerage, and in any case when a user accepts service from AOL, as long as AOL verifies that the user is aware of the binding offerage, then that is considered assent and the user may continue. This is not consensus ad idem. (I'll assume you're telling the truth when intimating a legal background; however for the help of external readers it's important to point out that this is something law websites get wrong on a regular basis, and is one of the primary examples of why the address of one's law school should start with a street number and not "www."
This is importantly different than ad idem because there are cases where they're interpreted differently. Though a rarity, we're seeing lots o
Nah. I write Nintendo games for a living.
It is like those EULA's what some company lawyer writes down is worth jackshit. If the judge in this case decides that Linden Labs has a case to answer they can take their agreement and shove it where the sun don't shine.
This isn't TV. Judges can't just decide to overturn licenses. There has to be a specific, defensible legal reason to overturn the license, and if there isn't, the licensor can just take it to be appealed. If a judge has a history of overturned rulings, they get censured, and eventually lose their bench seat. We're not in some kind of weird judicial oligarchy here. There are actual rules, and the judges are expected to abide by them.
If, on the other hand, you believe that there's a flaw in the license, please feel free to be specific. Given that that's essentially verbatim the set of clauses that the telecommunications industry has used successfully in case after case of shutting down spammers and network abusers, I think you'll find there's enough precedent that Linden is essentially iron-clad.
But Linden Labs have created a world where customers (not LL) own their personal content, and by implication they have independent lives and livelihoods and businesses etc etc. To cut off Bragg from his possessions, his virtual life, his livelihood and businesses was not only inappropriate, it was totally underhand and almost evil. They unilaterally executed this virtual person (I'm serious), without due process in-world nor any opportunity for defense.
Nonsense. This guy made an attempt to contravene the system. The license says "if you attempt to contravene the system, you will be cut off." He's a lawyer. He knew perfectly well what that agreement meant when he signed up to it.
There is no point at which someone who falls into proscribed punishments they've already agreed to because of an attempt to defraud other customers can be considered "evil." They're protecting their other customers, plain and simple. If he got a slap on the wrist, he'd just try other scams, and they have a responsibility to display to their customers that the customers are being protected.
Over and over and over again the Linden Labs license goes into how none of the stuff they sell - not the Linden Dollars, not the land, nothing - has any real value. Period. It's in the license. It doesn't matter what people decide it's worth, what they'll pay one another for it, none of it. That's not a real economy, no matter how much it acts like one, and no matter how much people want to pretend that means it is one. There's a very specific meaning to real value. If there was real value, they'd have to protect it. Because there isn't real value, they can't sell it directly. There was a long and interesting talk on exactly this at E3 this year; if you'd like to actually understand how the industry works, you should join us.
There is no real value here, and he agreed to a license that says "if you try to steal from us or the other customers, you're shut off, period." Exactly where do you think Linden has crossed the line? Do you actually believe that a lawyer shouldn't be expected to be bound by a license they agreed to when being punished for an obvious scam?
Nope. Linden Labs can take the property back, no problem, or at least have the virtual "contract" voided. This is because there was no "meeting of the minds" when the contract was executed. If I, by mistake, offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, when really I left out the decimal point and meant to offer $10.00, there is no obligation for me to actually pay that much money for something clearly worth much less.
They go over this in Business Law 101.
This is a dangerous and misleading reduction of the truth. In order to redact one's claim, one must have evidence that such a claim was unintentional. If you offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, and enter into a binding contract or exchange currency, that's just final, period. If you offer $10 in email, then accidentally leave the decimal out in an electronic transfer, then you can fall back on the email, claim that the deal was made in good faith at the lower amount, et cetera.
However, what you're suggesting amounts to carte blance for buyer's remorse, and that's just not the case. You can't just up and decide "oh, well, I didn't really mean what I told you I meant in writing, and handed over the receipt for." If there's a standard price like a blue book value, if there's a prior agreement, if there's a repeating price such as for a service which was accidentally renegotiated, sure, those things can be overturned.
But you can't buy something from me then come back two days later like "I wrote the number down wrong, nevermind, give me my money back." If that's what your college told you, then go to your college and try it with them. Be sure to protest with your professor's name as they laugh you out of the bursar's office and back into the real world.