Is California making a mistake?
Ars Technica has a great if brief article on California’s attempt to make “e-personation” illegal. E-personation basically means someone impersonates someone else on the Internet. This could be via Twitter, Facebook, or any number of web sites and services where people’s identities are at issue.
The bill is being pushed by Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto).
There is already grumblings by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that there may be some conflict between this law and the First Amendment. I tend to agree–the law should be written carefully.
Let’s consider some use cases to really dig into this:
Somebody impersonates me by using my full name on Facebook.
Is that acceptable? Or is this equivalent to a type of forgery or fraud? I would assume intent and believability would play a role. If the profile is specifically designed to harm me, and is written in a way that it mimics an actual profile I would use, without disclaimer, then this lives less in a grey area and appears more fraudulent, at least to me.
Somebody impersonates the President.
This is absolutely in a grey area, possibly so much so that it would be a difficult case to fight. Comics having been doing parodies of the President since, well, practically forever. But, again, what if the profile is not a parody but done in a way to convince people of its accuracy? Is this still legal, even though the President is a public figure?
Somebody impersonates a company.
This one hits home for me. I live in Louisiana, and I have to laugh every time I see @BPGlobalPR crack a joke that is obviously a slam against BP. (As an example of a recent tweet: “Tony Hayward is leaving us because YOU all demonized him! Make it right, and leave him with some kind words.”) Is there really any question that @BPGlobalPR is a parody, which is specifically protected under copyright law.
Senator Simitian needs to take a good look at how his bill is worded to ensure it doesn’t violate the type of parodies we have already found acceptable outside of the Internet.
