Invoking responsible internet behaviour

In Tom Anderson's worst nightmares, he probably never thought there would come a day when MySpace would be associated with cyber-bullying and the suicide of a teenager.

Yet this week, a jury delivered a verdict in the "MySpace case" as it has come to be called. The case centres on the death of Megan Meier, a 13-year-old who committed suicide after discovering she has been the victim of a vicious on-line prank committed by Lori Drew, the mother of one of Meier's friends. Drew was convicted of three misdemeanour counts of unauthorised computer access on Thursday. The jury couldn't reach a verdict on a fourth charge of criminal conspiracy.

When Anderson and his friends founded MySpace in 2003, cases like this were probably the furthest things from their minds. Since their inception, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube and all the other so-called Web 2.0 sites have been trying to bring blogging, streaming videos and online music to the masses.

What they achieved has changed how we work and communicate. The problem is, even though we now have all this wonderfully technology, many new users have also brought their joy of humiliating others to the online world.

Technology has changed, but people haven't.

For anyone with a "big picture" view of things, it's not surprising. Social networking is a new medium for communication and with every change has come a period of chaos. It happened with newspapers (yellow journalism), radio (the War of the Worlds broadcast) and television (the game show scandals of the 1950s).

But the Internet is different. First, unlike previous mass media, everyone can get involved, and second, it's virtually impossible to stop anyone from doing stupid and unethical things online.

A rule of thumb with the Internet is that once someone tries to stop a certain type of behaviour, someone else finds a way to work around it any barriers put in front of them.

But that hasn't stopped people from asking: how do we stop this from happening again? Who do we blame? Or in the case of companies, who gets sued?

Companies like MySpace and Facebook cringe when that last question gets asked, because in the inevitable civil law suits that follow, lawyers don't just sue individuals. As a general rule, individuals don't have a lot of money, and the first rule a lawyer learns is never, ever sue poor people.

Multinational technology companies are fair game, however.

So, knowing a lawsuit is coming, and despite the futility of stopping people from doing moronic things on the Internet, no company can risk looking like they're not trying.

So in an attempt to stop people from acting like idiots on the Internet, or at least that little bit of the Internet they control, the companies are relying heavily on TOU and EULAs or End Use License Agreements.

What is an EULA? It's that block of text you have to "agree" too before you're allowed to enter a site. You've probably never read one, even though you've probably agreed to many. Defence attorney's in the MySpace case attempted to convince the jury since "no one ever reads these things" they must be worthless. It didn't work. The result could have huge ramification for the Internet.