(And I don’t really mean I’d want a law against psychological endangerment. Those are my feelings speaking, not my head.)

Love that New Yorker cartoon, Listner. Can’t remember if I ever clipped it. It’s still one of the funniest in a long while.

Like the Times says, millions of users would be guilty of internet fraud if all those kids on MySpace or adults who fudged facts were held guilty — usually there’s no harm, e.g., I think of the movie Must Love Dogs where Diane Lane ends up on a date with her own father because he lied about his age.

Frankly no one should be OGLIGED to reveal their actual age and date of birth and it should in fact be illegal to have it revealed without their permission as a matter of privacy, not to mention it facilitates ID theft and all kinds of nuisances. Most people don’t even know how banks and other institutions post this data online without their knowledge. Our officials even encourage this, by now letting pharmacies sell your personal RX data to drug companies and other healthcare vendors: without telling us.
Using pseudonyms and fake addresses is even recommended for kids to avoid online predators.

What Drew did here was cruel and irresponsible, ethically corrupt. Since her intent was clearly to be hurtful, she violated the site agreement — but then, what about what goes on in blogs all the time, where personal invectives, among anons and pseudonyms, are the order of the day? Even on this blog, what if woody did himself in with a woodsaw next time reg hurls invectives at him and invites him to do so? (We know this is hypothetical because the two of them keep going at it, but theoretically…)

Kids say far more cruel things to and about each other on websites all the time, often sent out to the general public, yet that’s been ruled not illegal. E.g. a case in Beverly Hills where some middle school girls filmed themselves on cellphone saying nasty things about a classmate and putting it on YouTube, obviously causing great emotional distress. Yet the school did not have the right to suspect them for something done off-campus, and there are apparently no laws against it. THAT kind of thing SHOULD be generally illegal: posting something to defame someone.

This case’s ambiguities point up that regulation of the net, and balancing intent to harm against the First Amendment, lags behind the technology, as in many tech areas.

When one person drives another to commit suicide, there should be serious consequences. That person caused another to act criminally, and, suicide is a crime, although never prosecuted, of course.

I’m not going to try to analyze it, but it seems that this could be compared to the the Manson murders, in which one drove others to commit murder through psychological influence. Maybe a closer analogy is Jim Jones. (“Hey, I just poured the Kool Aid. They drank it.”)

I’d like to know what was in the heads of the four hold-outs. Maybe they got sucked into the phoniness of “12 Angry Men” and considered themselves noble.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a civil suit to follow this, ala O.J.

Kudos to the four jurors who blocked the felony conviction. That’s a lot of group pressure to withstand. Wu should grant the motion to aquit.

As for a law against psychological reckless endangerment on the internet, you’d have to eliminate adolescence. And, cyber trolls. One simply cannot know the psychological profile of one’s interlocutor. And, while I entertain myself speculating on the emotional maturity and stability of some, I’d genuinely rather not know. It is as that cartoon from The New Yorker, On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.