WASILLA -- A Palmer high school principal has dropped a lawsuit over a fake MySpace page created in her name after two students confessed to designing it.
Cyd Duffin, in an interview with the Virginia-based Student Press Law Center, said it was enough that the two students came forward and have been punished.
"(The students) learned a valuable lesson that wasn't too painful," she told the law center. "I did not want to make it into a bigger deal than it was. All I wanted to do was hold the kids accountable for their actions."
She declined to say how the students had been punished.
Reached Thursday in Washington, D.C., she said she was about to go into a meeting with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and didn't immediately have time to talk more about the case. She said the report by the law center "covers my story pretty well."
Jim Kawahito, the Los-Angeles based attorney who represented Duffin, said Thursday that the two students attended Colony High and his understanding was they approached Duffin after hearing about the lawsuit.
Mat-Su Borough School District spokeswoman Catherine Esary said she did not know whether the district was involved in the case or had taken any action against the students because of the Web page.
Duffin filed the lawsuit in March in Los Angeles County Superior Court charging defamation and invasion of privacy against both MySpace Inc. and the then-unknown parties responsible for creating the page.
Among other things, the page depicted the Colony High School principal as a drug-using racist with a sexually transmitted disease who insults disabled students and likes books about pornography, anarchy and the Ku Klux Klan. The prank page, which has since been deleted, also made defamatory statements about hearing-impaired students and the racial composition of students at Colony.
Duffin, in an interview earlier this year with the Daily News, said the personal attacks upset her, but she drew the line at implications the school was not a tolerant place for all students.
Although Duffin's case is resolved, the thorny question of how to deal with such fake Web pages and what, if any, recourse there should be for the targets of such pranks remains.
Duffin's lawsuit is one of about 250 such cases filed in recent years, according to a database administered by the Media Law Resource Center, headquartered in New York City.
State and federal laws address identity theft but most haven't caught up with how that applies in the electronic era of blogs and Web pages and where the line should be drawn between legitimate parody and defamation, said Eric Robinson, a staff attorney at the resource center.
Only a few states so far, such as California and Missouri, have passed laws specifically prohibiting impersonating someone online, he said.
Kawahito said many more cases never get to court. People simply decide it's too much effort and too expensive to track down those responsible, he said.
Duffin had to spend "a lot" to find those who created her Web page, he said. He declined to provide an exact figure.
Find S.J. Komarnitsky at adn.com/contact/skomarnitsky or call her in Wasilla at 907-352-6714.
By S.J. KOMARNITSKY
skomarnitsky@adn.com