Woman Sues MySpace For Taking Down Her Page

from the mental-anguish dept

It's no surprise that some people get attached to their various social networking profiles, but would you sue if the social network took down your profile? That's exactly what one woman is doing, as seen in a lawsuit filed last week and brought to our attention by Eric Goldman. The complaint lays out the details, but a quick summary is that the woman was shocked (shocked!) to find out that some of the celebrity profiles on MySpace are not, in fact, run by the actual celebrities. So she set up a profile that would "verify" celebrities, and allow those verified celebrities to place her logo on their MySpace page. She claims that one of the fake celebrities complained to MySpace and they took down her profile.

Now, you might think that since its MySpace's site, they can take down whatever profile they want -- but not according to this woman, who mentions the "mental anguish" caused by this over and over again. While it may be a bogus reason for MySpace to have taken down her page, it's not clear what legal grounds she has to stand on. There are some other complaints in the filing, including the fact that MySpace allowed fake celebrities to sign up (and the lawsuit demands that MySpace be forced to take these fake profiles down) and that she had asked MySpace (via a cold call) to support her efforts -- and then was offended when MySpace "stole" her idea and had created their own "celebrities" site (of course providing no evidence that the idea was "stolen"). She also complains that she tried to take her complaint to the arbitration firm listed in MySpace's terms of service only to discover that the firm no longer did work for MySpace, so she claims that MySpace committed unfair business practices by including the arbitration clause in its terms without living up to it.

The best line in the filing may be after MySpace took down the woman's second attempt at this "celebrity verifying" profile:

"At this point Plaintiff was literally seething with anger to the point that she was now consumed by it."

It's not clear what's illegal about making someone angry, but these days, you never know... Anyway, the full legal complaint is below (click through for those reading this via RSS):

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Principal Loses Lawsuit Against Students Over Fake MySpace Profile

from the taking-the-pal-out-of-principal dept

You may remember a story we had last year about a principal at a school so overreacting to some students creating a fake MySpace profile for him that he took them to court. It's one thing to ask MySpace to take down such a profile or to discipline the students in school (both of which would likely backfire as well), but to take them to court seems extreme. And, apparently, the courts think so too. An appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that there was no defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress in the case. Of course, the judge does also scold the kids for their "unacceptable" conduct. Luckily for the kids, "unacceptable" wasn't against the law in this case.

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