No Surprise MySpace Suicide Conviction Reversed by Trial Judge

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Peter Vogel
The tragic suicide death of a 13 year old girl is still part of this terrible story, but the trial judge finally did the right thing to say that the conviction was wrong. Even in these circumstances violating terms of service should not be a crime which was at the basis of the conviction. No doubt we will see more trials testing terms of service and privacy policies which will help develop the legal interpretation of social networking.
 
New Privacy Controls on Facebook
 
As Facebook continues to grow it is now trying new privacy controls in spite of the fact that most friends who sign up never review the Facebook privacy policies or terms of services. But will the +200 million Facebook users take advantage of the new features and will these new privacy features really protect the users? Only time will tell.
 
Web 2.0 Politics
 
Watching the recent events in Iran and China it seems pretty clear that Web 2.0 has a direct impact on politics, or why else would governments censor social networks? As we see cultures change with the proliferation of social networks laws need to be flexible and it seems only right that the Judge should reverse the MySpace criminal conviction which was a breach of contract. It is sad that a 13 year old died and the events that brought about the suicide are terrible, but not a crime. It is very bad judgment to use a social network technology to purposely hurt another person regardless of age.
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Cloud Computing - Interesting Legal Issues

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Peter Vogel

While most IT professionals are well aware of the evolution of Internet 2.0 computing services which offer on-line applications and large storage, in many ways this seems like an evolution of time-sharing from the 1960s when the likes of General Electric offered remote computing services to dumb terminals. Now Cloud Computing is one of the hot buzz words describing Software as a Service (SaaS) (sort of an updated term for ASPs- Application Service Providers) coupled with large amounts of storage. Major players are offering these services including IBM’s Blue Cloud,  Amazon’s S3, Google’s Apps, and Salesforce’s CRM. These Cloud Computing services allow users to collaboratively work on projects over the Internet using proprietary and open source applications. 

Collaboration is Great

One of the great benefits of using Cloud Computing like wiki tools is allowing collaboration, and many large companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle use collaboration tools to develop new technologies. It is hard to believe that Wikipedia started in 2001 and now has more than 2.5 million English articles since it reached a major milestone of 1 million articles in March of 2006. Clearly there are many other wiki success stories, but yet still skeptics about the accuracy and authenticity of the content.

How Secure is the Data?

Virtually no one reads the Click Agreement terms or Terms of Service when accessing Internet sites, downloading software, or registering on a website, nor do business people generally consult their attorneys about these Click Agreement terms or Terms of Service. So is any wonder that the vendors generally provide the services “as is,” without warranties and limit their liability and damages, and make jurisdiction and venue as inconvenient as possible to the user? Probably not, but when there are service outages that even the Service Level Agreements offer a reimbursement for down time, but not consequential damages. Another major concern is privacy of data since such laws such as HIPAA and the EU Data Directive restrict use of certain person information, and yet depending on how the Cloud Computing provider operates, these data privacy issues can be lost.

 

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