Supreme Court Meets Facebook
It’s my opinion that Facebook is just another media, and the judges should rule as if he hand wrote the threats and had them delivered. I don’t know what the judges will rule but this seems pretty clear cut to me, and reminds me of some of the recent patent troll cases. Doing something on a computer doesn’t make an act different at it’s core, and it doesn’t change the intent.
The Supreme Court next week will start working on a case involving something it’s never dealt with before.
The Court will hear arguments in the ‘Elonis vs. United States’ case. Anthony Elonis posted threats against his wife on Facebook, wondered online whether his wife’s order of protection was ‘thick enough to stop a bullet.’ He served jail time, but maintained the threats were just ‘blowing off steam.’
“There’s a long standing doctrine from the Supreme Court that you can’t threaten someone. They won’t protect that with free speech. But they’ve never had to consider before how that will apply to Facebook,” Charles ‘Rocky’ Rhodes of the South Texas College of Law told KTRH.