'Eraser' Law Will Let California Kids Scrub Online Past

gregor-e writes "The first-of-its-kind 'eraser button' law, signed Monday by Governor Jerry Brown, will force social media titans such as Facebook, Twitter and Google let minors scrub their personal online history in the hopes that it might help them avoid personal and work-related problems. The law will take effect on January 1, 2015."

Re:Is this even constitutional?

[Anonymous Coward]

Minors can enter into contracts. There are just different rules.

http://nationalparalegal.edu/public_documents/courseware_asp_files/domesticRelations/FamilyRelationships/Contracts.asp

Re:Is this even constitutional?

[Sarten-X]

TL;DR: Yes, yes, no, probably not.

I am not a lawyer, I am certainly not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I just read a lot of laws, and have far too many lawyer friends for my own good...

aren't they giving permission to publish it online? Can they really revoke that permission later?

Per the conditions of your site's Terms of Service (you do have them, don't you?), the content your users give you may or may not be retained, retransmitted, adapted, or whatever else. By using the site, your users agree to that and grant you permission. Those terms govern what you can do with what you're given. For example, Slashdot's terms [slashdotmedia.com] say that by commenting, you're giving them permission to publish your comments indefinitely, in pretty much any form they want. Under Slashdot's terms, that permission cannot be rescinded.

Minors are special [nolo.com]. Despite the apparent common opinion here, they can enter into a contract... they just usually can't be forced to uphold their end of it [nolo.com]. As far as copyright permission goes, this means you probably are already under a legal obligation to remove it if they want, because they can choose to void the contract giving you the permission... but to make you do that, the minor would have to realize the intricacies of contract law, realize that they still have exclusive copyright over their posting, and figure out how to contact you to request removal.

California's law requires an accessible way to remove (or request the removal of) a minor's own posting, that stops whatever's deleted from being published further. It's practically irrelevant, since most sites already have such a function... the problem is that it's hard to find, and people don't use it nearly as quickly as they should. The law only requires that such a function be "clear". Good luck with that.

Aren't there First Amendment issues here?

The First Amendment has no real part in this. The First Amendment is between you and the government, only. It does not come into play in contracts between you and a web site operator, unless the operator is a government entity itself. That might involve the First Amendment, but I doubt it will be a significant issue.

am I legally obligated to maintain that site forever

The law doesn't have any time limit built into it, so time limits will be up to the courts to decide, but the law also doesn't require you to actually erase the data. You're only forbidden from retransmitting it, so if your site has a self-service delete button, that's probably fine. If you take your whole site offline, nobody can get to it, so that's probably fine, too. Bringing it back later with all the old content intact is riskier. The exact type of site also matters, because the law only comes into effect if you know that minors are using it. A forum dedicated to the latest teen heartthrobs would obviously fall into that category, but a forum for discussing do-it-yourself RV repairs probably wouldn't.

I highly recommend reading the actual text [ca.gov] of the law. The first part is prohibiting certain advertisements toward minors, but the erasure part starts at section 22581. As with all legal text, realize that it's written to cover as much as possible, so try to ignore the repetition and it becomes much easier to read.

This law is crazy! You can't regulate that! Gosh!

[HatofPig]

Gee Whiz! This post is really just made to cancel out my unintentional bad moderation of a good post. This JavaScript interface sucks without a confirm feature.

Re:Great idea! Let's keep it going:

[TapeCutter]

Clinton famously said "I tried it in collage, but did not inhale", to paraphrase Gore Vidal, who knew Clinton personally at the time - "It's true he didn't inhale, but what he doesn't tell is the recipe for his cookies".

Re:Contest

[CrimsonAvenger]

As far as anything else, you can grow what to want as long as it's not impacting people not on your property and you are using it your self. If you are transporting food, or selling food across state lines then the feds can regulate it.

The OP is referring to a Supreme Court decision made during the New Deal (Wickard v. Filburn) - a farmer was growing grain to feed his own chickens, and was ordered not to by the Feds, since that violated a new federal law.

The Feds argument to the Supremes was that if this guy grew his own chickenfeed, he would not have to buy chickenfeed, and that thus his homegrown chickenfeed affected interstate commerce (by reducing the need for interstate commerce by this farmer (and the potential horror that others might try to get around the New Deal this way!)).

Long story short, the Supremes agreed with the Feds that growing your own chickenfeed was a matter that could be regulated under the Interstate Commerce Clause, and the farmer had to stop that immediately.