Here's a news story dated Sep 20: a New Jersey teen, without admitting any guilt, agreed to pay the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) $285k which includes $272k he made in an illegal stock manipulation scheme plus interest. The kid, who is only 15, claimed that a particular microstock he held was going to be shooting up soon and was going to be the next big Internet stock. Apparently people believed him and bought the stock and he sold at a profit, doing this multiple times.

Now manipulating stocks is illegal and the kid could have gone to jail as he had been charged as an adult. He settled out of court without admitting guilt. Even though they lost some money, I'm sure the kid and his family are very happy. He could have gone to jail. But more importantly it would have been a lot easier for the people that bought the stock based on the kid's recommendations (and if I remember the incident correctly, the kid was not posting as himself, but as some sort of stock expert) to sue him for damages.

There could be an argument that those people who followed some random "expert's" advice deserve what they get. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech in a vague way. It only says "freedom of speech" and doesn't specify just how much freedom. The courts have balanced the other Amendments and the rest of the Constitution versus the First, to limit it's application in obvious ways that are harmful to the general populace.

But that's an easy example. Here's another case I remember: some guy was dumped by his girlfriend. He took it badly and started writing pornographic stories wherein a girl with the same name and description as his former girlfriend is raped and killed. Not just one story but several, all on some alt.sex newsgroup. Eventually the girl finds out, the authorities get involved, and I don't remember what happened in the court case, although he was arrested on charges of threatening the girl.

Keeping in mind that I'm not researching this at all and it's all from a rather inaccurate memory: is it an assault or battery (one of them covers threats) if the guy doesn't send it to the girl and posts it in a public forum that she will likely never read? Or is it more akin to therapy, except he wants to share his creative work with other people? In general I don't like thinking about these sort of gray issues.

Maybe you think these two cases are clear as day. But I'm not so sure. The first case is more obvious that the kid is guilty because he profited from his stock manipulations. But what if he didn't have any of that stock? What if he didn't profit? Then it depends on how he presented himself and what he said. People say bad and good things about stocks all the time (and as long as you don't own the stocks in questions, or related stocks like competitors) but it's not wrong. If he had used his real name and been convincing, but not said what his age was, would that have been ok? Even if what he says totally changes the value of a stock?

The second case is much more gray to me. Morally, what the guy did was wrong. But so what? Our legal system, although based on morality, is not ruled by morals. It's ruled by laws created my moral beings, in most cases. So we have a First Amendment that protects freedom of speech and other forms of expression (and the Amendments protect us against the goverment, not each other for the most part). And yet he seems to be trying to hurt someone in a non-obvious way.

Oh well, that's enough for today. There are no resolutions or hard opinions on my side. This was just somewhere to write and collect some thoughts. Most people don't seem to take any time thinking about the hard societal issues. They just concentrate on their jobs or personal lives. We get an education so that we can be an informed citizenry and so that we can understand the issues with a little bit of research and help.

I've heard people wonder what's the use of this class or that subject, it won't help me in real life (or as adults: it didn't help me in real life). That's not the point of education (that's what a trade school is for). Education teaches us how to think, how to ask questions and find out answers for ourselves. And it arms us with the basic knowledge to pursue those answers with a much less chance of being befuddled by them because we don't have the requisite knowledge.