Websites to be forced to identify trolls under new measures

What this law means is if a UGC website is used by an individual for the purpose of harassment, the UGC website won't be liable for it as long as they co-operate in allowing the individual responsible to be prosecuted directly.

It essentially gives UGC sites safe-harbour protection whereas before they could have been considered responsible for the content themselves as publishers. The legal responsibility is pushed back onto the individual who created the content, which is exactly how it should be.

Sometimes these cases seem to be coming from people who just bought their first internet machine and become deeply offended that arguing on the internet works by different rules than their dinner table conversations. I would even go so far and argue that trolling can lead to a higher level of tolerance, as it pushes the believes of those being trolled over the top. In an ideal scenario this could lead to realization that their opinions, views, and in the end reality, are not as black and white as they think - i.e. a Steven Colbert effect.

Asking you to fill out a survey is not harassment, neither is trying to tell you stuff. This person was the victim of a vicious and malicious campaign against her, and you really have the guts to compare it to someone trying to sell you stuff on the street?

Online bullying is real bullying. Would you say that if someone sends you a text message you should ignore it because it 'could be a bot'.

Yes- people should be educated that people online may not be who they say there are, or may not exist. But I think this is orthogonal to the proposal, which is that if someone harasses and bullies you online, you should be able to find out who they are and stop them. Just the same way you'd expect the police to help you out if someone started making abusive phone calls to your house.

What? Compare to:

> "bullying" on paper isn't really bullying though. It's marks on paper telling you that some human being apparently said something.

> "bullying" on your voicemail isn't really bullying though. It's recorded sounds telling you that some human being apparently said something.

The medium is irrelevant; the content is what's relevant.

Let me just take a second to call bullshit on that.

I prefer this viewpoint: "a culture where the only people able to contribute to the national conversation are thick-skinned, insensitive, white, straight males who can repel or ignore this ugly trench of abuse is not a culture any thinking person should want to live in." http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/laurie-pen...

I also suspect that turning this into a conversation about spam and how this happens to everyone would be classed as "derailing"

Ok, lets be careful with it:

> "Identity theft is a form of stealing someone's identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name. The victim of identity theft (here meaning the person whose identity has been assumed by the identity thief) can suffer adverse consequences if they are held accountable for the perpetrator's actions"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_theft

Taking out credit in someone else's name fits that definition exactly. Just possessing a list of email addresses does not at all.

Now, as for making a fake facebook profile with someone's name and photos: "someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity" yes, that fits.

"typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits" - no, but note that is "typically" not "always".

"The victim of identity theft can suffer adverse consequences" - yes, that happened.

So on the whole I would say that the definition of identity theft fits in this case.