Photos that Melissa Lease, above, sent to her husband
appeared on MySpace.com. (Post / Jerry Cleveland)

Parker resident Melissa Lease discovered one downside of the Internet age when a friend told her that revealing photos she sent to her husband were appearing on social networking site MySpace.com.

While her husband was at home from a tour of duty in Iraq, Lease said, someone in his unit rifled through his belongings, found the pictures, which showed her posing in a bra and panties, and posted them.

"These pictures were made for my husband and no one else. Someone typed my name on MySpace and they popped up, and (my friend) came up to me and said there are inappropriate pictures of me and she asked me if I (posted) them," said Lease, a cosmetology student at Aveda Institute in Denver. "It was just a really uncomfortable situation."

MySpace has removed the pictures.

Unwelcome attention via websites is becoming more common as social interaction migrates to cyberspace, said Leslie Flint, legal research associate with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "In the past, it would be gossip or note-passing. This sort of thing happened, but it wasn't on the same scale."

No definitive numbers are available on how frequently privacy invasions or smear campaigns occur on the Internet. But Eric P. Robinson of the Media Law Resource Center in New York said about 60 lawsuits and criminal complaints have been filed nationwide against bloggers, most of them in the past two years.

This year, courts have rendered judgments against individuals for making defamatory comments on the Internet in cases in Florida, Georgia and North Dakota. Lawsuits are pending in Colorado, California, Texas and Utah.

Earlier this month, Tony Perri,head of Boulder's public-access TV station, Channel 54, filed a criminal complaint alleging a former producer at the station, Jann Scott, put up a MySpace page that defamed him.

Scott denied the charge in a telephone interview last week.

"Perri accused me of it, but I don't know anything about it," said Scott, who added that he had seen the Perri page before MySpace took it down. "I understand it as parody, protected free speech, so I am not worried about it or him."

The text on the page was vile, Perri said, accusing him of being a "suck up," and suggesting he engaged in a sexual act with members of the Boulder City Council.

The page went up after Perri suspended Scott for launching a campaign of harrassment after some of his shows didn't appear in the time slots he wanted.

MySpace, which is owned by media and entertainment giant News Corp., says it looked into the postings involving Perri and Lease and had them removed.

"We take our customer service and safety procedures seriously and will continue to investigate ways to make them as efficient as possible," said Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief of security.

Blogs, interactive websites such as MySpace and even sites that offer book reviews such as Amazon.com can be used to publish libelous material. But federal law meant to protect free speech on the Web makes it difficult for victims of unwelcome or even defamatory attention to take successful legal action against owners of a website where it appears, said Phil Weiser, a professor of law and telecommunications at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Federal lawmakers wanted to maximize the amount of free speech on the Internet when they passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, he said. So the act protects Internet service providers and websites from libel and other laws that govern what can appear.

"In general, the Internet is not subject to rules that encourage a closer editing of content; it is a wide-open environment," Weiser said. "This is an enormous challenge in the information age that we haven't been able to confront."

Anyone who wants to file a civil suit will have to pay a lawyer, and even if they win, there is a good chance the judgment will be more than they can collect, experts said.

Susan Scheff, of Weston, Fla., recently won $11.3 million in a defamation suit against a Louisiana woman who posted messages on the Internet accusing her of being a "crook," a "con artist" and a "fraud."

"I never expect to collect $11.3 million," said Scheff, who took a second mortgage on her home to pay the legal tab. "She went out there and discredited me and destroyed me and my family on the Internet. ... Whenever you Googled me, you saw these things."

Scheff has a business called Parents Universal Resource Experts that helps parents of troubled children find services such as schools.

Since her case became public, Scheff has received numerous phone calls and e-mails from others who have been maligned on the Web.

"I am amazed at the number of people who contacted me," she said. "I didn't realize it was such an epidemic."

Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.