Legal News

The Backlash Against the MySpace Conviction: Will it Hold up on Appeal?

By Ashby Jones

To be honest, we didn’t foresee this: a backlash of this type against last week’s conviction of Lori Drew. She’s the one who, along with a few others, used a fictitious MySpace account to harass a teenage girl named Megan Meier, who later hanged herself after finding out that the fictitious boy Drew created had dumped her. Last week, a Los Angeles jury convicted Drew of three misdemeanor counts of accessing a computer without authorization. (Click here, here, here and here for previous LB coverage.)

Now, according to this article on Wired.com, the conviction has led to pundits worrying over the consequences the verdict might pose for Internet users. (Hat tip: How Appealing)

“I don’t think it’s overstating it a bit to say that unless this case is overturned, it is time to get off the internet completely, because it will have become too risky to use a computer,” writes Groklaw’s Pamela Jones.

Uh, Wow.

Here’s the reasoning behind the reaction: Drew was convicted of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal anti-hacking law. Under the government’s interpretation of the CFAA, Drew obtained unauthorized access to MySpace’s computers by violating the site’s terms of service, even though Drew never read those terms. Critics fear that the verdict means that any computer user who violates a service provider’s terms of service could now face criminal prosecution for what in the past would have been, at worst, a civil breach of contract.

But will the verdict hold up on appeal? Orin Kerr, who worked on Drew’s defense team, thinks there is little chance the 9th Circuit will uphold the verdict, because it’s so plainly in conflict with what Congress intended in passing the anti-hacking law 20 years ago.

It’s a position that Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA, agrees with. The ruling is “strikingly broad and can’t possibly be what Congress intended with the statute and what the statute is properly interpreted as meaning,” he told Wired.com

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 02, 2008 (boomark / email).