Court rules against family driven out of town due to MySpace rant

Cynthia Moreno will be careful about what she puts on the internet in future. Her family has just lost a lawsuit against their local newspaper after they were driven out of their hometown following a minor rant on MySpace by the daughter.

Cynthia, originally from Coalinga, California, had just visited her family and returned to the University of California at Berkeley. She composed a short blog entry on her MySpace page, titled “Ode to Coalinga”, which began “the older I get, the more I realize how much I despise Coalinga”. It detailed her frustrations with her hometown and made a bunch of negative comments.

She probably amused a few of her top eight with it, some of whom were likely from Coalinga themselves. One person who wasn’t amused, though, was the principal of Coalinga High School, who spotted it and sent it to Pamela Pond – the editor of the local newspaper, the Coalinga Record.

Pond considered this a submission, for some reason, and printed it on the letters page of the paper. The community was incensed. Cynthia’s parents, David and Maria, and her younger sister Araceli, claim that they received death threats and gun shots were fired at their home. Her father’s business, which had been going strong for 20 years, was forced to close because it lost so much money. The family had to move out of town.

The Morenos filed a lawsuit against the principal of the school, the newspaper and its publishers, as well as the local school district. They alleged invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress. On 2nd April, however, the judge ruled against them, stating that:

“Cynthia’s affirmative act made her article available to any person with a computer and, thus, opened it to the public eye. Under these circumstances, no reasonable person would have had an expectation of privacy regarding the published material.”

The judge did rule, however, that their complaint of emotional distress should go before a jury. The family contend that the principal didn’t have permission to submit the blog post to the paper, so it’ll be interesting to see whether a jury agrees.

In the meantime, what do you think? It seems clear that a silly blog post shouldn’t have to force a family to move out of a town. Who’s in the wrong – the girl? the principal? the newspaper editor? Maybe just the population of the town for overreacting? Let us know your opinion on Twitter – message us at @techdigest.

(via Law.com)

Four Google executives to stand trial in Italy

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This is a rather worrying story. Google is awaiting confirmation from Italian courts that four of its employees will face trial there for failing to stop a video being uploaded that shows a disabled kid getting bullied. Sources claim that they stand accused of defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data.

The video in question shows, over the course of three minutes, four kids harassing a kid with Down’s Syndrome, and hitting him over the head with a pack of tissues. It was posted back in September 2006, and Google removed it within a day after it received a complaint, but that wasn’t good enough, claim prosecutors. It gained about 12,000 views…

Apple's App Store triggers ANGER and RETRIBUTION – iPint and iBeer developers come to legal blows

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The Carling iPint app is apparently little more than a shameless rip-off of Hottrix’s iBeer, according to the man who created iBeer – and is now suing the iPint makers for £7m.

Steve Sheraton, who came up with the original accelerometer-powered beer-drinking illusion app that we have been assured is VERY HILARIOUS after drinking three real beers, claims that representatives of brewing group Coors asked him if they could license his creation for use as an advertising tool. Steve declined, but the major corporation went ahead and created its iPint clone anyway…

Japanese Internet firms join forces to kill net connections of illegal file sharers

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While the British Government’s plans to tackle illegal file sharing remain at the Green Paper stage, Japanese telecoms companies have jointly implemented a scheme to cut off the Internet supply from known offenders.

According to the Daily Yomiuri Online (one of my daily reads, don’t you know), Internet users who repeatedly use popular file sharing sites such as Winny to download music and video will be sent warning emails which, if unheeded, will result in a loss of Internet connection…

Microsoft's innocence: teens won't download illegally if they know the law

home_taping_is_killing_music_logo.gifHats off to Microsoft for believing in teenagers. They’re not a bad bunch after all, are they?

Far be it from me to tarnish “all teenagers” with the same stereotypes, but I still had to laugh a little at the results of Microsoft’s latest survey, which suggests that teens wouldn’t download stuff illegally off the Net if they really knew what the laws were.

Nearly half of the seventh-to-tenth graders said that they weren’t familiar with the rules and guidelines for downloading images, literature, music, movies and software from the Internet.