Jawdropper of the week – Jennifer Cutler, of Washingtonienne fame, blogged about her sex life with plenty of details about her sex partners and their activities together. When one of her sex partners objected – with a lawsuit – Cutler’s attorney had the gall to argue that Cutler never intended to make the blog public.
Good grief. How is posting something on the internet not public? I suppose if you put it behind a password, you’d have some excuse for thinking it might remain private. You’d be an idiot, but an idiot with an excuse. She doesn’t even have that.
If the case goes to trial, its outcome will be important both to bloggers and to people who chronicle their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he may teach the Washingtonienne case this spring during his class at Georgetown Law School.
“Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that. It’s a different question when you reveal someone else’s private life,” he said, adding that simply calling something a diary doesn’t make it one. “It’s not sitting in a nice, leather-bound book under a pillow. It’s online where a million people can find it.”
I would be absolutely irate. It’s foolish to even consider that posting on the internet is a private matter.
Marc Rotenberg said it all
“Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that. It’s a different question when you reveal someone else’s private life”.
However there is a fine line between fact and fiction. Writing something about a similar event not involving real people, actions or circumstances is perfectly legit. Fiction writers have been making millions doing that through out history. Take “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown for example
“Writing something about a similar event not involving real people, actions or circumstances is perfectly legit.”
Definitely. If she’d written it up as fiction, he wouldn’t have much of an argument.