Autod Admit Lawsuit & Legal Implications of On Line Discussion Boards

In light of the fact that our topic for Wednesday's class is the legal implications of social networking, etc., I wanted to pass along two links for recent articles about the Autoadmit lawsuit.

For those of you who don't know anything about it, the basic background to this lawsuit is that two female Yale Law students were the targets of some very nasty and vicious remarks by fellow students who posted their comments on a website called autoadmit.com. The website was originally intended to be a discussion board, a place where students could communicate with each other and provide honest feedback about what life is really like at an Ivy League school. The purpose was to share "inside information" on professors, classes, general student life, etc. The "autoadmit" title refers to the fact that the students who are admitted into these Ivy Leage schools have such high test scores, grades, and other qualifications that they are "automatically admitted" into the Ivy League schools.

The root of the lawsuit is that fellow students (whose identities were not known since they used on line names and not their real names)started posting such nasty remarks that the female students were professionally affected by the comments. The two law students took a leave of absence from the Yale Law School, and one of them believes that she lost job offers because of the comments. Eventually, the two students got together and sued one of the owners and operators of the site, who was himself a law student at an Ivy League law school (University of Pennsylvania).

Interestingly, the basis of the lawsuit is copyright infringement, since one of the posts on the site included an on line beauty pageant, in which people voted, and one of the pictures used for this contest was a Facebook photo of one of the two female students. The lawsuit has gained a lot of attention of late because the one of the owners of the suit (the UPENN law student) sued the two female law students as well, claiming that he lost a job offer from a Boston law firm due to their suit against him.The story was even featured on National Public Radio a few months ago.

Needless to say, this law suit and its origins indicate just how complicated and even messy the effects and consequences our on-line actions can be.
For further details, here are the two links:

www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/28661

www.techliberation.com/2009/02/16/the-autoadmit-case-and-the-future-of-sec-230/