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"Trust me; I was so for this woman going away for twenty years," said the jury forewoman in the Lori Drew case.

Wired reports:

[Valentina] Kunasz said despite all the debate outside the courtroom about the prosecution's use of an anti-hacking statute to charge Drew for violating a web site's terms of service, jurors never considered whether the statute was appropriate. However, she said she agrees with the idea that users who violate a web site's terms of service should be prosecuted.

"The thing that really bothered me was that (Drew's) attorney kept claiming that nobody reads the terms of service," she said. "I always read the terms of service. . . . If you choose to be lazy and not go though that entire agreement or contract of agreement then absolutely you should be held liable."

Should they be punished with a federal prison sentence?

"I guess that's an option for debate," Kunasz said. "When it's gross circumstances of someone killing themselves. . . . "

Should it be considered a serious, federal crime to violate a website's terms of service? Remember when a blogger set up a Facebook page using my name? That violated Facebook's Terms of Use. ("[Y]ou agree not to use the Service or the Site to... impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity....") The blogger in question appeared in the comments to my post and confessed and bragged about his behavior. (I've preserved all his comments in case he now thinks it's worth his trouble to delete them.)

Now, I pursued the remedy I cared about: I got Facebook to delete the page. But imagine if some federal prosecutor went after him. It would be utterly abusive, in my view, and a violation of freedom of speech, but how is it different from what happened to Lori Drew?

I expect you to say that the blogger's hoax didn't cause a death. Okay, then let's make it a hypothetical: His taunting is severe and it drives me to commit suicide.

But he right answer is that Lori Drew's case was different because she was accused of using the website in order to obtain information about Megan Meier:

Drew... was convicted of helping create a fake MySpace account for a non-existent 16-year-old boy named "Josh Evans" to woo Megan and determine if Megan was spreading rumors about Drew's then-13-year-old daughter Sarah. According to testimony during the trial, Ashley Grills a then-18-year-old employee of Drew, created the "Josh Evans" account with Drew's approval and conducted most of the communication between "Josh" and Megan.

The federal statute used by the prosecutor -- 18 U.S.C. § 1030 -- is about unauthorized access of a computer and obtaining information.

Full post as published by Althouse on December 02, 2008 (boomark / email).