
Online Privacy
Recently in California, a student at the University of California wrote a poem on her MySpace blog about how much she hated her hometown Coalinga. The poem was picked up by the local newspaper in Coalinga, and the student subsequently received death threats from residents there.
The student sought to bring a suit against the newspaper by asserting that she had a right to privacy. That is, by publishing the poem, the newspaper infringed upon her right to privacy. Needless to say, the California Court of Appeals disagreed. If you are interested in reading the opinion, check out Moreno v. Hanford Sentinel, Inc. It’s fairly short.
A couple things to note here. First, the right to privacy differs from State to State and there is no Constitutional right to privacy. Second, the state of California does have a right to privacy enshrined in its State Constitution.
Here, the Court found that by publishing the poem on MySpace, the student waived her right to privacy. The Court seemed to find it important that MySpace is hugely popular, so the ruling may not apply to sites like YWS.
What should you take away from this, though? Be careful about what you write online. Too often, people write things believing them to be private communications when in reality anyone with an internet connection can read it. I remember in college running into a friend and I commented on something I read on her blog. Despite posting it on her blog (which she linked to from her AIM profile), she was bewildered I knew about it.
On the other hand, I’m bewildered the student didn’t sue the newspaper for infringment of copyright. Maybe there was a reason she couldn’t, but generally speaking, if you write something and you can prove you wrote it, then you automatically have a copyright on that work. Here, the newspaper had already acknowledged the student wrote the poem, and also presumably profited from the publication of the poem. Seems like an open and shut case of copyright infringement to me.