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Educators are closely watching a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit challenging YouTube's ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing web site-a lawsuit that could have important implications for the future of Web 2.0 applications, observers say.

7th grade bullying incident caught on camera and posted on YouTube. Parents are filing a lawsuit against the Palm Beach County School District claiming the school has done nothing to stop such incidents or to create a safe environment for students.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that a Texas girl's family filed against MySpace and its parent company, News Corp. The family said MySpace didn't protect young users from sexual predators.The court ruled that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 "bars such lawsuits against Web-based services like MySpace."

Students are increasingly facing lawsuits and expulsions for targeting their teachers online.Tech-savvy teenagers are increasingly paying a heavy price - including criminal arrest - for parodying their teachers on the Internet.\n\nTired of fat jokes and false accusations of teacher-lounge partying or worse, teachers and principals are fighting back against digital ridicule and slander by their students - often with civil lawsuits and long-term suspensions or permanent expulsions.\n\nA National School Boards Association (NSBA) study says that as many as one-third of American teens regularly post inappropriate language or manipulated images on the Web. Most online pranks deride other students. But a NSBA November 2006 survey reported 26 percent of teachers and principals being targeted.\n\n

The 2006 amendment to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires that public entities, including school districts, be able to produce electronically stored information from staff members, such as e-mail and other digital communications, during the " discovery process" in lawsuits.

Public schools and local governments may have more stringent requirements than most businesses for email archiving and electronic discovery. Yet, with their limited budgets, schools and local governments are often the least equipped to respond.The newly revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure define how email must be handled in federal court cases. Businesses tend to think that the FRCP focus is on interstate lawsuits. Schools and governments, however, also need to be concerned with emails relating to federally funded activities or any activity governed by federal legislation.In addition, schools and local governments have the burden of responding to (1) requests under open meeting and Freedom of Information Act laws, (2) offensive emails or those with sexual content involving students, and (3) emailed threats.

Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.

Students and parents are demanding Metro Nashville's public schools stop blocking access to Web sites about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. They complained to the American Civil Liberties Union, which on Wednesday gave Metro and Knox County schools an April 29 deadline to announce plans to open access to the non-sexual sites. A letter to the districts threatened lawsuits if they don't comply.

A former high school cheerleader is suing her former coach and the school district for $100 million after the coach allegedly read personal e-mails, WAPT-TV reported. The student filed the federal lawsuit after she said her coach got into her Facebook account and read the messages. One of the e-mails was between the student and another cheerleader and had profanity.

When Dawn and Bart Beye's 15-year-old daughter began showing signs of an eating disorder, they immediately took action. The Beyes enrolled the girl in a treatment program they thought was covered by insurance. Three weeks later, their insurance provider, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, informed the couple they would no longer pay for the child's treatment. Horizon claimed the disorder is not biologically-based, but emotionally-based, and therefore, not their responsibility to cover. The Beyes sued. And in what could have been a dangerous precedent-setting lawsuit, Horizon subpoenaed the daughter's online writings from MySpace and Facebook to prove it.

This web site explains the various rules behind the fair use principle. To help you get a feel for which uses courts consider to be fair uses and which ones they don't, they provide several examples of fair use lawsuits at the end of this chapter.

Most school administrators have more than one story to tell about cyberbullying. They report that victims of cyberbullying experience low self-esteem, peer isolation, anxiety, and a drop in their grades. They note that victims may miss class or other school-related activities. Principals also point to recent high-profile cases where cyberbullying, left unchecked, led to suicide. In response, some schools have created new policies and curbed free speech on the school's computer network and on all electronic devices used during school hours. This article offers practical advice for actions schools can take to curb bullying, ranging from policy development to education.

Don't believe everything you read on Bebo. That's the message an angry mother is sending by suing six U.K. newspapers that lifted a story off social-networking site Bebo about her daughter's supposed wild party.

Legal Implications for Searching Student Cell Phones. Although this article is written against Michigan law, it does help clarify some of the concepts for what is permissable. Note that searching a student's cell phone or wireless device without parent permission may violate state wiretapping laws.

Confiscating and looking at information on cell phones by school officials is still not clear. This is a very interesting case study for those working with digital citizenship issues at their school.

Fascinating article explaining Michigan take on searching and confiscating cell phones.

A federal appeals court in Philadelphia must decide whether a Pennsylvania middle school can suspend a student who, at home on her own time, created a lewd MySpace page aimed at her principal.

Colony High School principal Cyd Duffin doesn't do MySpace. So other people had to tell Duffin last October that a fake MySpace page appeared in her name -- a page depicting the principal as a drug-using racist with a sexually transmitted disease who insults disabled students and likes books about pornography, anarchy and the Ku Klux Klan.