By Yvette Wohn

Megan Meier (13) met Josh Evans (16) on MySpace, the online equivalent of malls for teenagers in the 21st century. After months of flirting, Josh “broke up” his relationship with Megan. “This world would be better without you,” he wrote. Megan fled upstairs to her room in tears; her mother later found her hanging by a belt. It was Oct. 16, 2006.

It would have been a very sad story of a girl who already had a history of depression and peer troubles. But there was an ugly twist. Josh wasn’t really a teenager– he was a fake profile created by Lori Drew, a 49-year old woman . The account was used by Drew, her daughter Sarah, and another family friend to find out if Megan was saying bad things about Sarah behind her back.

Megan’s parents learned about this hoax account about six weeks after Megan’s death, through a parent whose daughter had access to Josh’s profile. They took the case to the Missouri court and lost. Prosecutors in St. Charles County, Mo., declined to prosecute Drew or the teens involved, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to apply criminal standards for the state’s statutes on harassment, stalking or endangering the welfare of a child.

Prosecutors, however, took the case to Los Angeles, which is where MySpace servers are based. Recently, the grand jury indicted Drew with three misdemeanor violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is normally associated with hacking. She was charged for accessing protected computers without authorization– in other words, she had violated MySpace’s terms of service, which prohibits the use of fake identities and harassment of other MySpace members. That could mean three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000. (The jurors couldn’t agree on the charge that Drew conspired to violate Section 1030, a felony that carries a prison term of up to 20 years.) Drew has filed for an appeal.

Because Drew was convicted of an act unrelated to cyberbullying (or even identity theft– although she used a picture of an anonymous boy), many scholars (here, here, and here) think this case sets a dangerous precedent. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Citizen, and a group of scholars filed an amicus brief calling the case a threat to online free speech and the Heritage Foundation called the case a “case study in overcriminalization.”

While the Drew case has been drawing attention because of its legal twists, larger issues regarding malicious acts online still remain unsolved. With more and more people connecting to the Internet at faster speeds, are current laws enough to maintain a civil online environment? I asked Jonathan Zittrain a few questions about his take on the case and thoughts on regulations in cyberspace.

Q. Do you think the Lori Drew case sets an uneasy precedent?

Yes.  The facts are awful, and there might be a civil claim in there– Megan’s parents can sue Lori Drew for money.  But it’s not easy to figure out what criminal statute to draft to cover these facts without criminalizing a bunch of other stuff that’s more innocuous, and in any case no one has gone to that trouble– the hacking statute is a terrible fit for this.

Q. We are seeing an increase in slander cases on the Internet, but U.S. law clearly exempts web service providers from taking any responsibility for malicious content. How do you feel about this?

I’m not sure I’d describe this as “malicious content.”  It’s true that Federal law tends to relieve ISPs and online service providers like Myspace from having to monitor what others post through their services.  This is even further out: it’s activity that Myspace would have next to no chance of ferreting out beforehand, and as it stands, the scam was ultimately discovered.

Q. I know you’re a great fan of Wikipedia. Do you think “Wikipedic” self-cleansing measures can be used to clean up content on the web?

I think we can make great strides on technologies to facilitate social signaling, allowing people to express their preferences with respect to information that bears on them.  For example, Google News has started an experiment in this area that lets people who are quoted or mentioned in an article have a privileged place in posting a comment next to it when it appears as a Google News result.  Such signaling won’t help every problem– certainly I don’t think there’s much that could have helped in the Lori Drew situation– but we can’t try to preempt every possible problem with the law.  That’s why we have a tort system, to arrange for compensation later, and I suspect that Lori Drew very much regrets what she did– if only because of the enormous amount of disapprobation she’s experienced since the case went hyper-public.