College Times

As more students use Myspace and Facebook to connect with friends, they also use it to talk with them - and often that means talking trash about a professor, a school, a company or other acquaintances in a very public forum.

Newspapers, magazines and television networks can be sued for writing or broadcasting lies about people or companies, but can the average blog author?

Simply put: yes.

"If you make a defamatory statement about a person, you are liable for that content," said Laurence Winer, a professor of law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at ASU. "The individual on the internet (writing their blog) is publishing."

A defamatory statement is generally considered to be something that's false. Whomever or whatever a student writes a false statement about can sue for libel.

Some types of writings are protected, but as a general rule, lying on MySpace, blogs or other internet postings is not a good idea.

Determining what type of speech is protected from libel law, and what is not, can be difficult for the average writer to determine. And courts have given varying opinions about what kind of speech is protected and what is not.

Students need to be particularly careful, experts say, about how they discuss their professors and friends online, two groups that can sue for libel. While many students are used to talking trash about teachers and other friends with their friends, when they continue that discussion on a blog, they can put themselves at risk.

Some students say they find the possibility of being sued for what they write on MySpace or another blog to be an unfair invasion. "Somebody would have to go on Myspace, look you up and see what you wrote, said Christina Borrego, an 21-year-old journalism student at Arizona State University. "I don't agree with that."

But that hasn't stopped teachers, professors and others from suing.

An associate principal in Texas sued two of her students last year for creating a fake MySpace profile about her in which they referred to her as a lesbian and posted doctored pictures of her.

At least 50 libel cases were filed against bloggers last year, three against student bloggers.

In Florida, a jury recently awarded an $11.3 million verdict to a woman who was referred to by a blogger as a "crook" and "a con artist."

"What this verdict says is you can't go and destroy someone's reputation and post defamatory statements about them over the internet. It's something that hundreds and thousands of people can see and you can't get away with it. That's the bottom line," said David Pollack, an attorney in the case.

Pollack said that since the verdict, he has already received phone calls from potential clients.

"The real problem with these cases, for the people who are the victims of this defamation, (is) you can basically with the click of a mouse, destroy somebody's reputation, their business, their livelihood, their family with absolutely no justification," he said.

- MCT News Services contributed to this report

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