Principal sues students, parents over MySpace page
10/11/2006 10:46:44 AM,
MySpace will eventually be used to save the life of a cute puppy trapped in a well, and the company will bask in the glow of some unusual good press. But until that happens, we'll all have to settle for the more traditional stories of sexual predators, online harassment, and school officials who see MySpace as little more than a filthy cancer—and sometimes all three at once.
That's the case in Texas, where an assistant principal is suing two students and their parents over a MySpace page that depicted the administrator as a lesbian and contained "obscene comments, pictures and graphics," according to the court filing (.DOC).
Anna Draker, who works at Clark High School in San Antonio, knows the kids behind the site well. She had been forced to discipline them several times, and was aware of their animosity to her, but apparently did not suspect the lengths to which they would go to get a bit of revenge. Ben Schreiber and Ryan Todd set up a MySpace page in Draker's name earlier this year which "indicated by implication and by direct statement that Ms. Draker is a lesbian, which she is not."
Furthermore, the page featured comments from other MySpace users, many of them other Clark students who knew Ms. Draker. These messages were less than complimentary. And it wasn't just school students; "a few were individuals Ms. Draker did not recognize, that lived near Clark High School, and had made suggestive, lewd and obscene comments based on the content of the webpage.
One of the teachers at Clark brought the page to Draker's attention on April 19, 2006, and Draker claims that since then, she has had "many sleepless nights and worried days regarding this web page and the people who attempted to contact her through the web page." The situation rattled the school administration enough that Draker's picture was removed from the school website and a brief video about the dangers of MySpace was posted instead.
Am I my brother's child's keeper?
What sets this case apart from many other lawsuits filed over the content of blogs is that it doesn't target only the teenagers who created the site. It also argues that the parents were guilty of negligence by failing to supervise their children, and that they bear some of the responsibility for the defaming site. The police were able to determine that the computers used to create the site were located in the students' homes, and Draker's lawsuit says that the parents have a duty to know what their children are up to—especially in light of both students' past run-ins with Draker at school.
"Allowing access to the Internet, unsupervised and without restraint poses an obvious and unreasonable danger that such children would utilize the Internet for illicit purposes such as the ones alleged above," says the suit in accusing the parents of "negligent supervision."
We'll leave it to the courts to decide if this is sound legal doctrine, but there's certainly something in what Draker says. As we have repeatedly argued when it comes to video games, parents need to take an interest (and a supervisory role) in the media that their children consume, and that holds true when it comes to the Internet as well. Sticking a computer and a DSL modem in your child's room and never showing the slightest bit of interest in what he does with that technology is the height of irresponsibility.
But clearly a line has to be drawn somewhere. While parents should know in general what their kids are up to, they don't know everything. Nor should they—parenting should not be a Stasi-style exercise in control and absolute knowledge. What kid wants to live in a home like that?
So tricky situations like these end up before a judge, and such cases are becoming more common. Bloggers across the country are learning the hard way that writing a blog does not always mean you can say anything you want; sometimes, speech has consequences. The Media Law Resource Center has been tracking such cases, and now counts more than 50 cases in the US alone.
