The "classic situation" that many school districts face, Kaatz said, is teenagers using MySpace.com from their home computers to start a negative campaign against a fellow student, posting nasty comments, starting rumors or creating a fake profile page for the victim to spread false information.
One of the most notorious cases of alleged cyber-bullying occurred in Missouri and led a 13-year-old girl to commit suicide. In that case, however, the alleged tormentor was not another student but the mother of one who was posing as a 16-year-old boy, authorities said. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles earlier this year filed criminal charges against the woman, Lori Drew, for using the Beverly Hills-based MySpace site "to inflict emotional distress" on the girl, causing her death.
In cases involving students, experts say, many of the conflicts are not much different than youngsters simply calling one another names outside school.
But the Web has catapulted such fights to a new dimension, where slander becomes far more public and can be forwarded and reproduced in a matter of seconds.
Tom Hutton, legal counsel for the National School Boards Assn., said courts have generally held school officials to "very high standards" of proof in demonstrating whether they had a reason to assert their authority outside school.
He said school officials "have to make a snap decision at times. . . . That's a very tricky calculus to make."
In the Beverly Vista case, in which attorneys for both sides are in the stage of filing motions, the friends had been out of school for about two hours when they talked about another girl at school, directing some profanity at the girl but making no threats. The girl who recorded that conversation on her personal digital camera posted it on YouTube that evening.
The video was viewed by about 20 people, including the girl who was talked about in the recording, according to the lawsuit. In an Instant Messenger chat, that girl told the one who posted the video to "keep it up for now," court papers allege.
The next day, the girl and her mother went to the school's administrative office. School officials summoned the student responsible for posting the video and demanded that she delete the video on the spot, saying she had humiliated the girl who was talked about, according to court documents.
Assistant Principal Cherryne Lue-sang, who is named in the suit as a defendant, suspended the student for two days. None of the other teenagers in the video was disciplined.
