Realistically, if a sexual predator is being “smart” they will have no real identifying information on their MySpace profile. Given the absolute ease of setting up free and virtually untraceable email accounts, I don’t see any way for MySpace and the Attorney General’s office to “trace” predators to MySpace. About the only thing that i can think of would be to require sexual predators to register their ISP Providers and addresses, and trace the original source of the profile that way.

I’ll be interested to see if this actually “eliminates” any predators. It is one thing to prevent predators from coming near schools and libraries. The Internet is just so unregulatable, and is essentially one “big” play gorund for kids, and those who seek them.

MySpace to share sex offender data with states
By MARGARET LILLARD
Associated Press Writer

RALEIGH, N.C. – Faced with legal demands from several state attorneys general, MySpace.com said Monday it will immediately begin sharing data on the registered sex offenders it has identified and removed from the popular social networking Web site.

MySpace balked last week when attorneys general from eight states, including Ohio, demanded it provide data on how many registered sex offenders are using the site and where they live.

The company said federal privacy laws required the states to file subpoenas or other legal requests before it could release the information. MySpace general counsel Mike Angus said company officials met with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal last week to sort out the details of those requests.”We hope to get requests from every state,” Angus said. “From day one, we have preserved all the information in the hopes of getting these requests.”

MySpace, owned by media conglomerate News Corp., obtained the data from Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. The companies partnered in December to build a database with information on sex offenders in the United States, and Angus said MySpace has already used the database to remove about 7,000 profiles out of a total of about 180 million.

The companies “developed ‘Sentinel Safe’ from scratch because there was no means to weed (sexual predators) out and get them off of our site,” Angus said.

Last week, attorneys general in North Carolina, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania asked for the Sentinel data. The company initially refused, saying the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act required the states to file a subpoena or similar legal request before it could release the data.

North Carolina filed a civil investigative demand Monday, and states including Ohio, New York and Connecticut also pursued subpoenas. Blumenthal said his subpoena “compels this information right away – within hours, not weeks, without delay – because it is vital to protecting children.”

Cooper said the information from the Sentinel system could potentially be used to look for parole violations or help in investigations. He said lawmakers in North Carolina are considering legislation that would further restrict access to social networking Web sites, including one that would require parents’ permission for minors to set up a profile.

READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE

Chris Nichols
www.NicholsTrialLaw.com

17. Procedure For Making Claims of Copyright Or Intellectual Property Infringement

We respect the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same. We may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, disable and/or terminate….

Anyhow, I’m guilty of typos all the time, and I do try to use the spellcheck, but the above goof is, well, pretty bad.

-Chris Nichols

I’ve been getting a case ready for trial, and I tried something new that I thought was quite helpful and I wanted to share. I always dread (and my staff dreads) the redacting of the medical records and police report for trial exhibits (and demand packages).

Why We Redact

Because of the collateral source rule, I always “white out” all insurance information on bills, auto insurance information on police reports, and other matters that I know will be objectionable or prohibited at trial. (For the non-lawyer, you may not know, but we are not allowed to tell the jury, or even suggest to the jury that the negligent person getting sued actually has automobile insurance, or, that it is the auto insurance company that will pay for the damages, or, that it is the insurance company that is refusing to make a fair settlement. Yes, we know that’s unfair, but those are the rules.)

The Messy Options of Redaction

Over the years I’ve used liquid “white out”, tape strip white out, roll on white out, and just about ever product they have released. That resulted in an often messy exhibit, requiring “whiting out” recopying, whiting out and recopying. No fun.

Scanners Work Better than White Out

Despite the fact that I have been using a scanner in my practice for a while, I kept using the “old school” whiteout method out of habit. No more. This time I simply went straight to all my scanned documents.

A Few Simple Steps

• I saved the medical bills and the police report under new file names, such as “medical records redacted.doc” and “police report redacted.doc “.
• I then used PaperPort to access the .pdf file and I then used the “eraser” function to simply “erase” the information that I normally “whited out”.
• When I was done, I printed the pages out and they were ready to go to Kinko’s for enlargement.

You could use any program that allows you to add text or images to a .pdf file. You could probably even “paste” a .pdf image into a Word document and use the “picture editor” to erase info, though the tools in PaperPort are much easier.

The Advantages Over Old School Methods

The “eraser” function was so much more precise and easier than the old method, plus, it doesn’t leave “white out shadows” or smudges, and it erases the problem the first time, every time. Also, it makes it easy to make multiple copies with different redacting marks, such as for a police report where you are not sure how much information a judge will let in at trial, so you have to have “choices” on the exhibit.

I’m not sure why this didn’t occur to me earlier, but I suppose that old habits die hard sometimes. 

Chris Nichols
www.NicholsTrialLaw.com