Legal News

MySpace a Bulletin Board, Not Private Room, Says California Court

By Ashby Jones

How do social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace fit within the world of privacy law? Are such sites private rooms in which one can pen his or her internal thoughts without fear of others misappropriating such thoughts? Or are such sites really just bulletin boards for the world?

An appellate court in California weighed in on the issue on Friday, and basically sided with the bulletin-board position. Click here for today’s story, from the Recorder’s Mike McKee.

The backstory: Judging from the description on its Web site, Coalinga, Calif., sounds pleasant enough: “Coalinga has an excellent school system, a medical center, parks and recreation district, a 2-year community college, and enjoys a low level of crime through law-abiding citizenry.”

But the appeal of a 2-year community college and a law-abiding citizenry wasn’t enough for a woman named Cynthia Moreno, who, while a student up the road at UC Berkeley, penned an online rant on her MySpace page about how much she hated Coalinga, the town in which she grew up.

But the message — originally intended just for a small handful of friends — got picked up by the Coalinga newspaper, which reprinted the rant. Hate mail rained in on Moreno and her family. It proved too much, and the family ultimately moved away.

Moreno and her family sued the newspaper and its publishers, as well as an official at the local high school who initially saw the rant and alerted the newspaper to its existence. They alleged invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Late Thursday a Fresno, Calif.-based appellate court said she had no grounds even if she meant her thoughts for a limited audience on her MySpace page.

“The facts contained in the article were not private,” 5th District Court of Appeal Justice Bert Levy wrote. “Rather, once posted on myspace.com, this article was available to anyone with Internet access.” Added Levy: “Under these circumstances, no reasonable person would have had an expectation of privacy regarding the published material.” He noted that Moreno’s “potential audience was vast.”

Free-speech lawyer Karl Olson called the ruling a “2009 Internet version” of a 1984 ruling in which a San Francisco court ruled that a gay man who was outed by a column by Herb Caen after he stopped an assassination attempt on then-President Gerald Ford couldn’t sue for invasion of privacy.

“Certain people didn’t know he was gay, but he had come out of the closet [to others],” Olson said. “So I think when you post something on the Internet — even if you’re not really thinking very carefully about what you post — you don’t really have a privacy claim.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 06, 2009 (boomark / email).