Lori Drew And The Case Of The Curious Ruling

It seems that the law of unintended consequences could be striking back pretty quickly, at least in the case of Lori Drew and the MySpace cyberbullying that lead to a teenager comminting suicide. The case was wrapped in emotion and touchy legal issues, and understandably the public wanted to punish this woman for her ridiculously negligent behavior, but there are no laws currently that can apply to the situation. Well, we didn't think there were, until the prosecutors used some obsucre laws to convict Lori Drew of what essentially is computer hacking, based on her violation of the terms of service of MySpace. As Chris Soghoian over at CNET puts it:

The specifics of the Lori Drew case are messy and emotional. The important fact is that there is no cyberbullying statute, and so the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles turned to a novel interpretation of existing computer hacking laws to try to punish the woman. The general idea is that in creating terms of service, a Web site owner specifies the rules of admission to the site. If someone violates any of those contractual terms, the "access" to the Web site is done without authorization, and is thus hacking.

Unfortunately for Internet users everywhere, a jury bought the theory last week, and found Lori Drew guilty of three misdemeanor violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, punishable with up to one year in a federal prison and a $100,000 fine for each of the three counts.

This raises a lot of issues that could in turn affect all of us. Have you ever set up a MySpace profile for an alter-ego that isn't really you, or even a fake celebrity page? Have you edged your weight to say 150 instead of 180 (hell, if I wear the right t-shirt, I look 155!)? What about using a dating site to hook-up and not really actively pursue a "dating relationship?" It's very possible, under this ruling, that those could be considered federal offenses and you could be subject to fines and jail time.

Scary, isn't it? What's the real problem here though? Is it that people lie online? Well, sort of, but that's not the whole story. In fact, I think that's a completely separate issue from cyberbullying. It's my belief that we need to call on our leaders to enact realistic laws to protect people online, while maintaining our rights at the same time. We need to call on our leaders to also examine the reality of these TOS (Terms of Service) for websites as well. I don't think they should go away, but there is absolutely no reason we as consumers should have to read 10-page documents of legaleze that we do not understand just to update our status on Facebook (this could also extend to EULAs, which is a different issue, but same common problems).

It's one thing to say that something needs to be done, and another to say what exactly needs to be done. I'm not so sure what the best way to handle this is, from a legal stand point. I know something needs to change, but couldn't tell you exactly what. Clarifying and simplying TOS will help (possibly making universal ones as well), but that doesn't solve the cyberbullying too.

Do you have any solid ideas to to solve this issue? I'm not sure I want to leave it all up to Biden and his, essentially, anti-Internet freedom stance, but our leaders need to act soon to keep these issues from becoming larger and larger.