Congressional Rep Wants To Put Internet Trolls In Jail

from the well,-that's-an-idea dept

Last year, the lawsuit against Lori Drew got plenty of attention. It involved the sad story of a girl, Megan Meier, who ended up killing herself after a "friend" she met on MySpace ended their friendship in a rather rude fashion. It later turned out that the "friend" wasn't a real person, but a made up individual, created by a former friend of the girl, that girl's mother (Lori) and an employee of Lori created the person (they claim) as a way of finding out what Meghan was saying about Lori's daughter. The whole story is quite sad, obviously, and suggests incredibly poor judgment on Lori's part. However, was it illegal? The initial analysis was not at all. However, prosecutors then twisted computer hacking laws to charge her, and she was eventually found guilty of misdemeanor computer hacking for creating a fake person on MySpace. This ruling was troubling for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it's now quite easy to make anyone a criminal via terms of service. Also, the fact that it actually is likely to put more kids at risk.

That particular case was distorted by a few issues, involving the fact that Lori was an adult while Meghan was a child. If the MySpace friend "Josh" had been a real teen, would the same outrage have happened? I had a friend in high school kill himself after his girlfriend dumped him. Should she have been charged with a crime?

However, with emotional cases, come bad legal precedents and bad laws. Missouri (where this happened) already rushed through an "online harassment" law, and now it looks like we may get the federal equivalent. Rep. Linda Sanchez has introduced a cyberbullying law (named after Meier) that could put people in jail for up to two years for online communications "with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person... to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior."

Yes, this effectively makes online trolling a crime. It's difficult to see how this gets past even the most basic First Amendment review, but that won't stop politicians from grandstanding over it.

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The Rise Of The Clipart Trolls

from the the-fun-of-copyright-law dept

There are so-called patent trolls, abusing patent law to basically force others to pay them cash for no good reason. And there are "sample trolls" who have abused copyright law to get musicians to pay them money (often despite the fact that the "trolls" probably really don't even own the copyrights in question, and the use is almost certainly "fair use" anyway). And... now... we can add to the list the "clipart troll." Slashdot has a post detailing the apparent campaign of one George Riddick, who apparently claims to hold the copyright on tons of common clipart, and is trying to use the recently enacted ProIP law to basically threaten tons of sites, who often were using clipart that they had licensed. Riddick may, in fact, own the copyright on some of these images, but rather than try to build an actual business around them, he seems to have focused solely on blaming others for his own failure to craft a reasonable business model -- and now it's moved on to suing others as well.

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The Problem Is Patent Quality, Not 'Trolls'

from the obviousness dept

A site called Prepaid Reviews reports that four US wireless carriers have been hit with a patent lawsuit from a company called Intellect Wireless. Prepaid Reviews writes that "If Intellect Wireless was a firm that bought patents with the implicit intent of lawsuit, I could talk about the need to reform patent law. But if these are original inventions by Henderson, he has a case." I think this fundamentally misconceives the nature of the "patent troll" problem. The fundamental problem is about patent quality, not about motivations or business strategy of the people abusing the system. Advocates of patent reform like to focus on classic patent trolling firms whose only business is lawsuits because the extortionate nature of the transaction is most obvious in those cases. But if an otherwise-legitimate company gets an overly broad or obvious patent and proceeds to sue everyone in sight, that's still a problem, even if the firm really was the first person to develop a product fitting the description of the patent. Consider one of the patents in this case, for example. While the patent makes a lot of claims and it's difficult to decipher legalese, the patent appears to be claiming a monopoly on the concept of "visual voicemail" systems where you can see a list of all your voicemail messages, and information about who sent them to you, and then choose which messages you want to listen to first. This is a clever idea, to be sure, and it's possible nobody had done it yet in 2003. But it's also a pretty straightforward application of ideas that had been around long before 2003. I've been able to see a list of my text messages and decide which one I want to read first since long before 2003, for example. To a software engineer, voice is just another type of data, so "visual voicemail" is an obvious extension of "visual text messages." In an ideal world, a patent examiner would have recognized this and rejected Henderson's patent. But in the real world, the courts have made the rules for patenting so permissive that a ton of patents get awarded for obvious concepts. This would be a bad thing even if there weren't any patent trolls around.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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