A 19-year-old Florida man committed suicide live on his blog after announcing his intentions on the site earlier. There’s been an understandable reaction from his family. The website is accused of total inactivity while this was happening.
The net’s legendary non-prosecutable, non-regulatory, status may be in for a shock with this one. It might also be in for a massive reaction. The site could, at least theoretically, have been acting illegally by doing nothing. In many cases, failure to report a crime can be an offense.
See
Chris V Thangham's DJ article for the full story about this sad incident.
The BBC:
Authorities say Abraham Biggs took an overdose of anti-depressive drugs.
He posted messages online telling people he was going to kill himself and then started streaming live pictures from his home.
Reports say that some of viewers who logged in to watch began to encourage the teenager to commit suicide, others tried to dissuade him
.
After several hours, when he had not moved some viewers finally notified the site's moderator, who then called the police.
The boy's sister said: "They got hits, they got viewers, nothing happened for hours."
If that description of the sequence of events gives you the impression there’s a legal minefield involved, you’d be right. The fact that he previously expressed the intention to commit suicide may well be the beginning of long and difficult series of legal arguments.
The realistic expectations imposed on sites dealing with incidents like this are another matter. It’s not unreasonable to expect a site moderator to pick up a phone,
if aware of the incident. However, moderators aren’t everywhere at once, as most people would have noticed.
Some viewers thought it was a hoax, probably at least until the webcam showed police arriving.
That, of course, is another aspect. Online users aren’t law enforcement agencies, nor are they in a position to make a diagnosis of the mental or physical health of someone who may just be playing a prank.
The New York Times
The student, Abraham Biggs, 19, was enrolled at Broward College and suffered from what his family said was bipolar disorder. He killed himself in his father’s Pembroke Pines house; it was unclear how many people were watching. Mr. Biggs announced his plans to kill himself over a Web site for bodybuilders, the authorities said. Some users told investigators they did not take him seriously because he had threatened suicide on the site before.
Another problem. Many suicides make previous attempts and threats before getting it “right”.
If this guy was bipolar, it also means that users didn’t know which pole they were seeing. So site users were reacting to a person they may have thought was Jekyll, when it was Hyde.
The bit about users encouraging suicide isn't unusual. I've seen that myself, and pretty sickening it was. Someone came online and told the guy that it was one less animal in the world, if he did. Everyone on the thread reported it, immediately, but we never heard from that guy again.
So a legal principle kicks in where it hasn’t applied previously, and the questions are very serious.
Can the site be considered party to the suicide, due to those posts on the blog? Can people who are effectively inciting someone to commit a crime be charged?
The site could be in trouble, and so could the net. Suicide, in most countries, is a crime. Posting criminal acts online isn’t new or anything like new. But this time the criminal law element has a talking point, in that the site can in theory be deemed to have been aware of a crime in progress, and failed to report it.
Past criminal acts aren’t something the site could be expected to do much more about than just take them down. A live broadcast, however, is something quite different. Even if the site couldn’t make a judgment about Biggs’ intentions, and would naturally have been inclined to discount his statements, the guy committed suicide live on their site, and died.
Screen grab
Biggs killed himself live via an Internet video. The video continued to run until a police officer, pictured here, stopped the tape.
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Take this a step further, and you see where the legal issues for the net kick in- If you see a bank robbery or homicide being committed live on a website, which is quite possible, what do you do, if you’re the site owner? Do you have a choice?
Don’t be surprised if you hear a lot more about this.
Note: All the comments in this article are purely theoretical legal arguments, and there’s no suggestion made or implied that the website breached the law, knowingly or otherwise, regarding Mr. Biggs’ suicide.
The various legal factors could have big ramifications for net broadcasting, hence the discussion of legal issues regarding a truly horrible incident.
