MySpace: A Place for Lawsuits

Social networking site MySpace is hit with a $30 million lawsuit after a 14-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a 19-year-old man she met through the site. The suit claims "that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 'utterly ineffective.'"

As the story is told here, the family is missing out on some further opportunities to spread the blame for the man's crime to deeper pockets. Lawyer Adam Loewy

said he was confident about the lawsuit, which he said seeks damages worth 1 percent of the company's estimated worth.

"We feel that 1 percent of that is the bare minimum that they should compensate the girl for their failure to protect her online when they knew sexual predators were on that site," he said.

Both whoever their telephone provider might be, and most likely both the state of Texas and the federal government (ostensible owners of the roads the accused rapist used to meet her and take her to the scene of the crime) seem at fault as well in facilitating his heinous action, as they too surely are aware–or should have been, if they weren't so damn criminally negligent–that sexual predators are on the phone and on the roads.