LOS ANGELES:A US District Court judge has sided with a student who posted an allegedly bullying video on YouTube, saying the school went too far in suspending her.
Amid rising concerns over cyber bullying, and even calls for its criminalisation, some courts, parents and free speech advocates are fighting back: students, they say, have a right to be nasty in cyberspace.
One morning in May last year, a student walked crying into Janice Hart's office at a Beverly Hills school. She had been humiliated and couldn't face going to class, the girl told the counsellor.
The night before, a classmate had posted a video on YouTube with a group of other students bad-mouthing her, calling her ''spoiled'', a ''brat'' and a ''slut''.
Text and instant messages had been flying ever since. Half the class must have seen the video by now, the girl said. The counsellor took the problem to the principal, who took it to a district administrator, who asked the school district's lawyers what they could do.
In the end, citing ''cyber bullying'' concerns, school officials suspended the girl who posted the video for two days.
That student took the case to court, saying her right to free speech had been violated.
Judge Stephen Wilson wrote in his judgment: ''To allow the school to cast this wide a net and suspend a student simply because another student takes offence to their speech, without any evidence that such speech caused a substantial disruption of the school's activities, runs afoul [of the law].
''The court cannot uphold school discipline of student speech simply because young persons are unpredictable or immature, or because, in general, teenagers are emotionally fragile and may often fight over hurtful comments.''
The ability of schools to limit student speech is an age-old issue that has been repeatedly tried and tested in the courts.
But with teenagers increasingly in cyberspace, school officials find themselves on unfamiliar grounds. Free-speech advocates said the notoriety of highly publicised cases, such as the Missouri girl who committed suicide after a mean-spirited MySpace message, have led to schools cracking down on student expression on the internet.
''If all cruel teasing led to suicide, the human race would be extinct,'' said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
In Pennsylvania, a student sued when he was suspended for 10 days for creating a MySpace profile of the school principal. The student referred to the principal as a ''big steroid freak'' and a ''big whore'' and said that he was ''too drunk to remember'' the date of his birthday.
The judge found that even though the profile was ''lewd, profane and sexually inappropriate'', the school did not have the right to restrict speech because the profile did not cause disruption on campus.
