Pennsylvania teens win MySpace free speech cases

(CBS/AP) PHILADELPHIA - Two Pennsylvania teens cannot be disciplined at school for MySpace parodies of their principals created on home computers, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The postings, despite how lewd or offensive, were not likely to cause significant disruptions at school and are therefore protected under prior Supreme Court case law, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found.

But, the six judges who dissented in one of the cases said they fear that this will mean online attacks against school officials could go unpunished.

"It allows a student to target a school official and his family with malicious and unfounded accusations about their character in vulgar, obscene, and personal language," Judge D. Michael Fisher wrote in the dissent involving the Blue Mountain School District in eastern Pennsylvania.

In that case, an eighth-grade honors student, who was disciplined for two dress code violations, created a fake MySpace page in March 2007 using an actual photo of the school's principal and a fake name. The page claimed to be that of a 40-year-old Alabama school principal who described himself as a pedophile and sex addict. The profile page's address included the phrase "kids rock my bed."

"Though disturbing, the record indicates that the profile was so outrageous that no one took its content seriously," the 3rd U.S. Circuit majority wrote Monday, overturning its own prior ruling. "(The student) testified that she intended the profile to be a joke between herself and her friends."

In the other case, high school senior Justin Layshock in December 2005 created a parody that said his principal smoked marijuana and kept beer behind his desk. The school district suspended him, but the suspension was overturned by a district judge, the appeals panel and now the full 3rd Circuit.

In both cases the families initiated lawsuits to appeal the school suspensions. Neither family condoned the conduct, but both said they disciplined their children at home, the court agreed.

"We do not think that the First Amendment can tolerate the school district stretching its authority into Justin's grandmother's home and reaching Justin while he is sitting at her computer after school," the unanimous court wrote in Layshock's case.

The school argued that Layshock entered the school zone when he cut and pasted Trosch's photo from a school website, and showed the Web page to other students in class.

Fisher stated in his Blue Mountain dissent that  any distinction between off-campus and on-campus speech is "artificial and untenable in the world we live in today."