I don't think MySpace was hurt anywhere near as much as the girl. Isn't this whole story not so much about damage to MySpace as about Lori Drew being prosecuted using CFAA charges and the ramifications to free speech (or even in how people use the internet)?
Sure, so we should devise ways to protect them online. But we shouldn't start criminalizing the wrong things in a futile attempt to make people think they are safer.
Depends on your definition of 'require'. Fine print can sometimes be at odds with the stated/advertised aims of the service. I think they should treat everyone with respect, and understand there is a wide range of users on the system that should be catered for intelligently.
I would never lie or defraud. I think you are taking an approach suitable to say online banking and trying to apply it to all activities on the internet. I run a community site and in many cases we don't care if users give non-real details, or create test personas on our site.
I don't see how 'giving the wrong details is lying' to a level punishable by law. On the site we run, we wouldn't necessarily be upset with a user who used non-real details when registering, and would not necessarily refer to it as 'lying'.
My main point is the injury is mainly due to the harassment itself, not the wrong details on the profile.
Businesses may be allowed to require valid information, but if they don't bother to ensure submissions are valid (say, a Photo ID check?) maybe they aren't REALLY requiring valid information even if they say they are, and given the nature of the service, the user isn't necessarily committing fraud.
I run a magazine/community site that asks for first and last name when registering. We don't expect that all of the given names are real and in most cases we don't really care. I certainly wouldn't characterize a false name on our system as fraud, and I don't see why everyone is so quick to assume the worst case scenario on this stuff..
But she didn't lie to get access.. She gave the wrong details when getting access. And not all access by giving false details is fraud according to the law.
Exactly... makes me wonder if you were to draw a parallel with harassment by post.. Would sending a letter 'from a secret admirer' now be considered fraud, whatever the intent? (Failure to disclose identity OMG!!)
I don't see how this is really relevant.. everyone participating on MySpace (hopefully) has some sense of the relative lack of certainty about who they are talking to. Its part of the service! What next, will Second Life require all personas to display their real world appearance prominently on their avatar at all times?
I don't see how not filling in your profile correctly can so easily lead to a criminal offence... There's a lot of circumstances where the most you could be truly guilty of is 'not bothering to read the terms' (hardly intrinsically criminal), or of being a 13 year old saying you are 14 to use the service (again not truly a criminal action?), or someone in industry might make a test profile to do competititve analysis (again not criminal intent.. etc
Of course the safety of others can override your right to free speech, but the problem here is they seem to be trying to criminalize the thing that isn't intrinsically dangerous (with negative effects for free speech), rather than actually dealing with the real problem, the actions of a person that may have been damaging.
We keep a lot of old email for customer support purposes.. It really helps if you can search and quickly see the history of previous dealings with a customer going back 8 years (for example quickly seeing the previous communications with a guy who has login problems every time he signs up to our site, which he does every few years, each time not following the instructions properly).... (we don't have time/money so far to implement a proper customer support ticket system).
Definition 5 from the regulations: "The term 'land remote sensing' means the collection of data which can be processed into imagery of surface features of the Earth from an unclassified satellite or satellites, other than an operational United States Government weather satellite."
It appears to only apply to 'satellites'?
But in practise they do allow it. They might be trying to stop people serving high-traffic websites from home, but if my ISP stops me serving my own files to myself over port 80 (to allow me to login and grab files when on the road), I will move to another ISP, because I want full internet access. If nobody offered that, I'd start an ISP myself.
I think we have to take a stand to stop the internet being treated more and more as 'media'. What about Slashdot? Isn't this more a message board, not media? Are all our posts to each other be considered 'news publishing' now, or can we still have one-to-one and group discussions with a reasonable expectation that it is treated as such?
But if you tell someone else (Bebo) that you are a drunk, the Daily Mail shouldn't be allowed to then run news saying you are a drunk based on your Bebo posting. You may have been joking, for example.
The Daily Mail should report only something like "topham claims to be a drunk on social networking site".
The posting may have been publicly accessible, but there is a difference between a Bebo user communicating anything with users of Bebo (both registered and public visitors), and then the press portraying this as 'news'.
The Daily Mail simply reported the postings depiction of events as fact, when really they should have reported that that "Bebo user x has said that...". Thats seriously not the same thing, and they should know better.
If I post on Bebo that I have stopped beating my wife, I would expect to be able to sue the Daily Mail if they then run a story claiming I have beaten my wife. (I'm not married).
Thank you for the tips... (I've had problems using rsync (being more producer than tech guy), now using Mozy which does block-levelbackup... But the question was about legality.. You are always going to have beginners and they will make mistakes an duse up huge bandwidth legally..
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think MySpace was hurt anywhere near as much as the girl. Isn't this whole story not so much about damage to MySpace as about Lori Drew being prosecuted using CFAA charges and the ramifications to free speech (or even in how people use the internet)?
Sure, so we should devise ways to protect them online. But we shouldn't start criminalizing the wrong things in a futile attempt to make people think they are safer.
Aren't you confusing the persona and the real person? The restraining order is for the real person, not the persona.
Depends on your definition of 'require'. Fine print can sometimes be at odds with the stated/advertised aims of the service. I think they should treat everyone with respect, and understand there is a wide range of users on the system that should be catered for intelligently.
I would never lie or defraud. I think you are taking an approach suitable to say online banking and trying to apply it to all activities on the internet. I run a community site and in many cases we don't care if users give non-real details, or create test personas on our site.
I don't see how 'giving the wrong details is lying' to a level punishable by law. On the site we run, we wouldn't necessarily be upset with a user who used non-real details when registering, and would not necessarily refer to it as 'lying'. My main point is the injury is mainly due to the harassment itself, not the wrong details on the profile.
Businesses may be allowed to require valid information, but if they don't bother to ensure submissions are valid (say, a Photo ID check?) maybe they aren't REALLY requiring valid information even if they say they are, and given the nature of the service, the user isn't necessarily committing fraud.
I run a magazine/community site that asks for first and last name when registering. We don't expect that all of the given names are real and in most cases we don't really care. I certainly wouldn't characterize a false name on our system as fraud, and I don't see why everyone is so quick to assume the worst case scenario on this stuff..
Because I want to use or test the service?
But she didn't lie to get access.. She gave the wrong details when getting access. And not all access by giving false details is fraud according to the law.
Exactly... makes me wonder if you were to draw a parallel with harassment by post.. Would sending a letter 'from a secret admirer' now be considered fraud, whatever the intent? (Failure to disclose identity OMG!!)
I don't see how this is really relevant.. everyone participating on MySpace (hopefully) has some sense of the relative lack of certainty about who they are talking to. Its part of the service! What next, will Second Life require all personas to display their real world appearance prominently on their avatar at all times?
I don't see how not filling in your profile correctly can so easily lead to a criminal offence... There's a lot of circumstances where the most you could be truly guilty of is 'not bothering to read the terms' (hardly intrinsically criminal), or of being a 13 year old saying you are 14 to use the service (again not truly a criminal action?), or someone in industry might make a test profile to do competititve analysis (again not criminal intent.. etc
Of course the safety of others can override your right to free speech, but the problem here is they seem to be trying to criminalize the thing that isn't intrinsically dangerous (with negative effects for free speech), rather than actually dealing with the real problem, the actions of a person that may have been damaging.
We keep a lot of old email for customer support purposes.. It really helps if you can search and quickly see the history of previous dealings with a customer going back 8 years (for example quickly seeing the previous communications with a guy who has login problems every time he signs up to our site, which he does every few years, each time not following the instructions properly).... (we don't have time/money so far to implement a proper customer support ticket system).
In that case, its not the third but the eighth. (Other licensees in the 90s were Motorola, Radius, APS Technologies, DayStar Digital, UMAX)
Hmmm.. My apartment is orbiting the sun.. Is it a satellite?
Definition 5 from the regulations: "The term 'land remote sensing' means the collection of data which can be processed into imagery of surface features of the Earth from an unclassified satellite or satellites, other than an operational United States Government weather satellite." It appears to only apply to 'satellites'?
But in practise they do allow it. They might be trying to stop people serving high-traffic websites from home, but if my ISP stops me serving my own files to myself over port 80 (to allow me to login and grab files when on the road), I will move to another ISP, because I want full internet access. If nobody offered that, I'd start an ISP myself.
that's not full internet access.
Especially if its a fictional account...
I think we have to take a stand to stop the internet being treated more and more as 'media'. What about Slashdot? Isn't this more a message board, not media? Are all our posts to each other be considered 'news publishing' now, or can we still have one-to-one and group discussions with a reasonable expectation that it is treated as such?
But if you tell someone else (Bebo) that you are a drunk, the Daily Mail shouldn't be allowed to then run news saying you are a drunk based on your Bebo posting. You may have been joking, for example. The Daily Mail should report only something like "topham claims to be a drunk on social networking site".
The posting may have been publicly accessible, but there is a difference between a Bebo user communicating anything with users of Bebo (both registered and public visitors), and then the press portraying this as 'news'. The Daily Mail simply reported the postings depiction of events as fact, when really they should have reported that that "Bebo user x has said that...". Thats seriously not the same thing, and they should know better. If I post on Bebo that I have stopped beating my wife, I would expect to be able to sue the Daily Mail if they then run a story claiming I have beaten my wife. (I'm not married).
Thank you for the tips... (I've had problems using rsync (being more producer than tech guy), now using Mozy which does block-levelbackup... But the question was about legality.. You are always going to have beginners and they will make mistakes an duse up huge bandwidth legally..