By now most of you are familiar with the story of the Missouri teen who committed suicide after being harassed on MySpace by an adult posing as a 16-year-old. It’s a horrific tale of cruelty that will find no satisfactory ending, despite the latest effort of California authorities to manufacture one.
According to the Los Angeles Times, a grand jury has been convened there in the hope of bringing criminal charges against the person or persons responsible for the harassment; not for the harassment, per se, but for defrauding MySpace, which is headquartered in Beverly Hills.
While much of the media attention has been focused on First Amendment issues regarding the hurtful posts, I’m seeing a different difficulty in this novel legal approach. My layman’s guess is that MySpace will have little interest in playing the victim here.
From the Times story:
Local and federal authorities in Missouri looked into the circumstances surrounding 13-year-old Megan Meier’s 2006 death in the town of Dardenne Prairie, an upper-middle-class enclave of about 7,400 people, located northwest of St. Louis. But after months of investigation, no charges were filed against Lori Drew for her alleged role in the hoax. Prosecutors in Missouri said they were unable to find a statute under which to pursue a criminal case.
Prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, however, are exploring the possibility of charging Drew with defrauding the MySpace social networking website by allegedly creating the false account, according to the sources, who insisted on anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
I’m not lawyer, obviously, but it would seem logical to suppose that if MySpace can be “victimized” by the postings of an anonymous user pretending to be someone they are not, the company would also be responsible for the postings of those who identify themselves or at least portray themselves accurately.
This would make MySpace a publisher … and you can be certain that MySpace doesn’t want that kind of responsibility.
I could be way off base, of course. And as the old saying goes, a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
But it says here this pig will never fly.
