MySpace faces uncertain legal ground

January 18, 2007. The popular Internet meeting website MySpace.com has recently been named in a number of lawsuits that alleged it failed to protect minors from the advances of potential sexual predators. Last year, four underage girls were assaulted by men the met on the popular networking site, and their families filed separate suits in Los Angeles Superior Court that contend the site waited too long to enact security measures that would have protected young people.

In response to these suits and general public feeling, MySpace changed the way its users can find people, and also implemented a new security feature called Zephyr that should enable parents to monitor changes in their children's individual accounts.

MySpace is not the first online meeting system to suffer from public scrutiny over the potential dangers of its meeting services. Yahoo and Microsoft have had to shut down popular chat rooms and message boards in 28 countries due to the preponderance of child pornography and online predators.

The laws governing these issues are still in their infancy; these services ban illegal use of their progams but are governed by no set of laws stating how they should operate or what security features they must have to protect their users. Terms of Service are usually very explicit in regards to the potentially illegal actions of some people, individual sites set their own ways to deal with the problem.

Many legal experts predict that these cases and others like them will present a number of problems to litigators, mostly because of the lack of case evidence. Without precedent or even a clear understanding of the issues at hand, many jurists would be hard-pressed to deliver informed decisions. There is somewhat of a history of early, similar cases against AOL. The Florida Supreme Court rejected a claim in 2001 that AOL was negligent when it failed to police its community chat rooms.

Another avenue prosecutors may take falls under the "reasonable care" part of standard premises liability statutes. MySpace could be held liable if they failed to take reasonable care to prevent foreseeable criminal acts, although this argument relies on different interpretation of the law than is currently accepted by a great deal of the legal community.

Even still, some legal experts believe that MySpace's responsibility ends when prosecutors claim that it should prevent people from meeting in the real world. Time will only tell what the judges will say.