Arizona Republic: “A proposal that could add hundreds of new Internet domain names to the network beginning as early as next year has industry insiders concerned about confused users, squabbling businesses and security.”
Wall St. Journal: “Spate of Lawsuits Shows User Discomfort With Latest Innovations in Online-Tracking Technology. Tools that track users’ whereabouts on the Web are facing increased regulatory and public scrutiny and prompting a flurry of legal challenges.”
New York Times reports on a lawsuit filed by parents of a student of the prestigious Horace Mann School in New York because the school suspended the student for three days when it learned that the boy had pictures on his laptop computer of two topless female students at the school. The pictures of the topless Horace Mann girls were found by other students who searched the boy’s computer without his knowledge or consent. Despite the girls giving their pictures to the suspended student voluntarily, the boy was punished and given a black mark on his school record that will affect his applications for colleges.
Los Angeles Times: “A false sense of Internet security can mean legal quagmires for critics who are careless about facts. . . . Although bloggers may have a free-speech right to say what they want online, courts have found that they are not protected from being sued for their comments, even if they are posted anonymously. Some postings have even led to criminal charges.”
Findlaw: “In this column, I’ll focus not on the CDA holding dismissing Facebook as a defendant, but instead on the subsequent decision dismissing the defamation claim against the teenagers who posted to the Facebook group, and thus ending the case. I’ll argue that the judge did the right thing in dismissing the defamation claim, but I’ll also contend that future Facebook defamation cases are likely to be much more difficult to resolve than this one proved to be.”
See also part two of this column.