Today, the “Legal Guys” on CNN (who appear every Saturday at noon), Avery Friedman
(Cleveland) and Richard Herman (Las Vegas) raised a downstream liability issue.
The details are than Friday, a defense attorney in Wisconsin argued that adult attempted
murder charges against one of the two Wisconsin girls should be dropped because
the girl sincerely believed she was defending her family against the Internet
character “Slender Man”, so that charges could be filed in juvenile court. The Chicago Tribune has a story (with video) here. Friedman and Herman discussed the idea that
with juvenile charges, the girls could be out of prison or custody by age 25
and lead a life. With adult charges,
they face 60 years in prison. Although Wisconsin is socially liberal in some
ways, it is a difficult state for defense attorneys.
The “Legal Guys” said that the creators of Slender Man
could not have criminal responsibility.
But Friedman thought that civil suits were possible against the content
creators, although not against service providers (under Section 230). This comes from “Creepypasta” and “Something Awful” as explained in Gawker here. On the surface, it would sound as
though, since Creepypasta accepts user-generated content, it would also be
protected by Section 230. Friedman and
Herman weren’t specific enough to mention this legal way out.
Again, this is an area where voluntary content
labeling, which I discussed in some detail in recent posts (particularly on the
COPA blog Feb. 26 (as an indirect result of my research after Blogger’s
announced “porn ban” which it then rescinded) would be the systematic way to
solve this problem.
I was not allowed to see horror films as a kid, and I
recall being traumatized by the idea when growing up. Age suitability (relative to cognitive maturity) involves a lot of other matters besides nudity and pornography, but the systems we have now cause the public to incorrectly regard these concepts as equivalent.
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