Watchdogs File Brief In MySpace Case
The Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and a group of 14 law professors filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief arguing that violating an Internet service's “terms of service” agreement isn't a criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The brief submitted in United States v. Lori Drew explains the legal theory behind the government's indictment of Drew would effectively criminalize the actions of millions of Web users.
The suburban St. Louis mother allegedly created a false profile on the popular social networking site MySpace, posing as a teenage boy, to engage a 13-year-old neighborhood girl, Megan Meier, in conversation. Drew's conversations with Meier were allegedly cruel and harassing and Meier hanged herself.
“The Justice Department has blundered terribly in this case. By reaching for the same statute used to prosecute computer hackers, this indictment has turned the law into a blunt legal instrument that turns every violation of a site's terms of service into a federal crime,” CDT’s Leslie Harris wrote in an opinion column earlier this year. A case like Drew's would typically be handled under state or local law, but Missouri did not have a criminal statute that would reach her conduct and DOJ jumped in.
In other legal news…
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday reversed a lower court decision that many, including CDT, argued had the potential to chill innovation. The lower court ruling had blocked Cablevision from rolling out a digital video recorder system that stores recorded TV programs on remote servers instead of in set-top devices in customers' homes. The appeals court's ruling found that providing a remote DVR does not constitute direct copyright infringement.
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