Mixed verdict in Megan Meier/My Space case

Last Wednesday, the Jury in the case of Megan Meier – the 13-year-old who committed suicide in 2007 after the defendant Lori Drew, her daughter,and another teenage girl first befriended Megan and then bullied her under a fake MySpace profile – came to a verdict.
The jury convicted Lori Drew of three misdemeanor computer crimes for her part in setting up the MySpace hoax, but were unable to agree on the fourth count of conspiracy.
This was the first time that a federal statute, that was designed to fight computer crimes was used to prosecute violations of a user agreement on a social networking site.
According to the Associated Press, a majority of the jurors wanted a felony conviction for Drew, but four jurors rejected that Lori Drew had conspired to harm Megan Meier, believing that she had created the false account only to obtain information about rumors on her own daughter.
Drew could face up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine for her convictions on three misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization.

MySpace hoax trial begins today

The trial of Lori Drew of Missouri, will begin today in Los Angeles. The opening statements are expected this afternoon. 13 Year old Megan Meier committed suicide on October 17, 2006 after a fight with the hoax “Josh”, whom Megan thought was a 16-year old boy. Her former friend, the friend’s mother Lori Drew, and the mother’s 18 year old assistant Ashley Grills had set up the MySpace account with the fake identity of a “good-looking” boy who had just moved to the area. Megan Meier and Lori Drew’s daughter and their family were friends who lived in the same street, but the two girls drifted apart in 2006 . 

Lori Drew allegedly encouraged her daughter and her employee Ashley Grills to “flirt” with Megan. But on October 16, another girl form the neighborhood received the password for the “Josh” account and sent Megan a message, telling her that he didn’t want to be her friend anymore because she was mean to her friends. After Megan received more mean messages from other people, Ashley Grill sent Megan Meier a final Message on October 17, saying that “the world would be a better place without [her]”. Grills told Good Morning America that she had wrote that message to end Megan’s relationship with the online hoax because she thought things had gotten too far. Later Megan’s parents found that she had hanged herself with a belt in her bedroom. She died in the hospital the next day. 

After learning from Lori Drew’s involvement in the case, Missouri officials did not charge her, because they did not find any law that she had violated. Looking for anything to hold Drew responsible, the federal court in Los Angeles, where MySpace has it’s headquarter, has charged Drew with conspiracy and three counts of unauthorized access to protected computers (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act [CFAA], 18 U.S.C. § 1030). The trial will not focus on whether Drew caused Megan to commit suicide, but on whether she violated MySpace’s terms of service in order to inflict emotional distress on Megan.

Each of these charges involve a maximum prison term of five years. According to the prosecutor, this will be the first time that the statute that was originally intended to fight cyber hacking will be used in a case of cyber bullying.  Drew’s attorneys and other outside legal experts argued that a criminal convcition for a terms of service violation would be a dangerous expansion of the law. They argue that most people never read the terms of service before joining a social network. And that if Lori Drew never read the terms of service, could not have “(…)intentionally accessed and caused to be accessed a computer (…), namely, the MySpace servers (…), without authorization and in excess of authorized access, and, by means of interstate commerce obtained and caused to be obtained information from that computer to further tortious acts, namely intentional infliction of emotional distress on [Meier]”, as the indictment reads. As there is doubt as to whether the CFAA statute even applies to the conduct here, the outcome of this trial will be interesting and defining for the internet law. 

Germany reforms GmbH Law

On November 1, 2008, the new law to reform the existing GmbH Law (MoMiG) came into effect. The reform represents the biggest change of the act since it was original enacted in 1892. According to the German Department of Justice the reforms goals are flexibility and deregulation on the one hand, and better protection against violations on the other hand. Although the GmbH is Germany’s most common form of a limited liability company, the biggest handicap of the GmbH Law was always the difficult and expensive founding process. That lead to a wave of German entrepreneurs who founded a British “Limited” (“private company limited by shares”) instead. To strengthen the GmbH against other European corporate forms, German lawmakers reduced the costs and administrative work that is required to establish a GmbH. The required minimum founding capital has been reduced from €25,000 to €10,000. Additionally, investors are now able to form a new category of GmbH that is called “Mini-GmbH” (officially: “limited liability entrepreneurial company” – “haftungsbeschränkte Unternehmensgesellschaft, UG”). This new GmbH form can be started with a start capital of €1. However, the “Mini-GmbH” must put aside one quarter of it’s annual profits to allow the share capital to grow. When the capital is at Gmbh level, the “Mini-GmbH” can change it’s form and name into a GmbH.

Cell phone buyers in the UK will be required to show passport

According to the Sunday Times, the British Government plans to strengthen state surveillance by forcing every person who buys a cell phone, including prepaid phones, to show a valid passport as proof of identification and register in a national database that will combine data of owners of all 72 million cell phones in the UK.

The proposed database will, if realized, contain information about every phone call and every email sent in the UK. As this database would be of lesser use to the police with information on the prepaid phone users missing, who represent more than half of all cell phones in the UK, the government announced plans to introduce a compulsory mobile phone register for next year.

Apparently, prepaid phones are often used by criminals and terrorists as the calls are nearly untraceable. There are stricter regulations in other countries, for example Turkey, where users have to register every cell phone, even as a visitor, and Japan, where you need not only a passport, but an official Japanese ID card, which takes a Visa and at least a month to obtain. But there are also countries where attempts for state surveillance through phone registration by the government failed.
I remember that, ca. 10 years ago, German government agencies tried to force providers to require photo ID and to register all prepaid customers. The providers sued and won, as the courts held that registration was a violation of privacy laws. And even before the court’s ruling in Germany, especially with markets like Ebay, it proofed to be virtually impossible to control the fluctuation of prepaid SIM cards. This shows that a mandatory cell phone user registration would not only be a potential violation of privacy, but would also be absolutely impractical.

27 year old ‘Spam King’ Robert Soloway sentenced to four years prison

Spammer Robert Soloway was sentenced to 47 months prison on July 22, 2008 for violations of the CAN-SPAM Act. It is only the second time an offender is sentenced under the statute. Prosecutors had asked for a 9 year sentence. Civil judgments against Soloway in 2005 didn’t stop him from spamming. That was probably due to the fact that the money that was awarded to Microsoft and an Internet Provider was never collected, and also because Soloway was optimistic that there would be a ‘loophole’ in the law that would prevent him from getting prosecuted.

Soloway was arrested on March 2008.  He pleaded guilty to mail fraud, fraud in connection with e-mail, and tax evasion. Soloway was apparently a compulsive shopper, who owned among other luxury articles, 24 pairs of designer sunglasses.