International Law

The New York Times covers some of the legal issues surrounding Juicy Campus, a site I have blogged about a few times over the past few weeks (see here and here):

... Juicy Campus [is] an eight-month-old Web site (JuicyCampus.com) that cultivates and distributes gossip across a network of 59 college campuses. Promising that all posts will be anonymous, it allows students to participate in a collegiate version of celebrity gossip sites like TMZ.com and PerezHilton.com; it is a dorm bathroom wall writ large, one that anyone with Internet access can read from and post to.

...

For many students who have been written up on Juicy Campus, even those who are accustomed to posting provocative pictures on Facebook photo albums and drunken videos on YouTube, the experience has been a formative lesson that an online reputation is as much a part of one?s permanent record as a grade-point average or a credit score.

?Juicy Campus is really just an exclamation point following everything that?s already been going on,? said Daniel J. Solove, an associate professor of law at George Washington University who specializes in online privacy.

College students, he said, aren?t ?thinking about the consequences because they haven?t experienced them yet and because they weren?t warned by their parents, who didn?t experience them, either.?

Despite their distaste for the site, some legal experts believed  Juicy Campus could not be sued for gossip posted by its users.

?Legally, Juicy Campus is fully, absolutely immune, no matter what it runs on its site from users, just like AOL is not responsible for nasty comments in its AOL chat rooms,? said Michael Fertik, a graduate of Harvard Law School and the founder of reputationdefender.com, a service that helps clients remove defamatory material about themselves from the Internet.

But he added that the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides the site legal protections, was ?functionally Mesozoic? in the blogging age. Juicy Campus, he said, ?is not encouraging people to be themselves, it?s encouraging people to be the worst version of themselves.?

Even if such options were open to him, the Yale student whose pornographic past was exposed on Juicy Campus said he would probably not take action against the site. ?Revenge means focusing on someone else, when what I need to do is take care of myself,? he said. ?I?m not a gossip person, which means I?m not a counter-gossip person, either.?

The day after his history was revealed, he changed the photograph on his Facebook profile to one of himself giving viewers a halfhearted thumbs up.

Read more here.