Heide Iravani Fights Online Bullying

Heide Iravani

Heide Iravani Profile

This is the most vile case of cyber bullying that I have come across and perhaps this case might change the rules of the game from now onwards. (Brittan Heller is also in the same boat as her).

Who is Heide Iravani

She is an uber accomplished women from the Yale Law School who was a victim of some the worst form of cyber bullying according to media reports. Now I am not trying to paint her as all rosy. She stepped on a lot of toes in real life and those folks used the anonymous feature of the internet to gather at one of the most popular message boards online and talk some stuff about her.

So what have you now

When this news reached Heide Iravani and she realized what was going on behind her back online, or perhaps figuring how popular the boards are, (they get about 700,000 unique visitors a month), she saw her name pop up over there and people talking some nasty things. (Remember Juicy Campus, anyone?).

Mess With a Lawyer

So what happens when you mess with a lawyer, especially one who is from an ivy league and is just starting out. Well you are basically waving a red flag to the bull.

So Heide Iravani ended up filing a law suit I believe and the case is under deliberations. But here is where things start to get interesting.

The website in question is AutoAdmit and then you have the Big Daddy of internet – Google. Had these two companies been the regular brick and mortar, Heide would have sued their pants off. But honey this is the new world order. And Google, Autoadmit etc are just information relayers, they are not creators.

In the early days of Internet, to provide unfettered growth to the new online economy, the government made a rule that such internet companies like Google cannot be held responsible for what they carry on their pages. (Especially Cached pages).

So there you have a Grey area and now lawyers are gearing up to question whether such rules ought to continue existing or are legitimate grounds for challenge.

What say you? Let it be known below.