Should Parents Be Held Responsible For Their Child’s Online Behavior?

The Internet is a big, dangerous place where kids can get in all kinds of trouble. That’s at least the line fed to us by various groups that advocate parents take a stricter approach in monitoring their children’s Internet usage. It’s a noble sentiment, but can parents be held responsible for their child’s actions online?
It’s an interesting question, and one that the German courts have been trying to tackle since 2007. At that time, a couple’s 13-year-old son had uploaded over 1,000 songs to various file-sharing networks. The record industry demanded that the kid’s parents pay the damages, but the parents refused and took the matter to court.


According to TorrentFreak, the record companies argued in court that the parents could be held responsible for their child’s action because they didn’t fulfill their parental obligations. By that, the plaintiffs meant that the parents didn’t do enough to educate and monitor their child in the first place, which led to the aforementioned uploading of songs. The District Court agreed with the record companies and ordered the couple to pay €5,380.
The parents took the case to the Court of Appeals, but they found no friends there either. The court once again ruled that the parents didn’t do enough to stop their son’s file-sharing. This time, however, the court said the cause was that the parents didn’t install some kind of monitoring or blockade software that would have prevented their son from installing file-sharing software on his computer.
After almost five years of fighting, the parents took the case to the Federal Court. The highest court in the land overturned the two previous rulings, and freed the parents from any responsibility. In the ruling, the Federal Court said that the parents had already fulfilled their basic parental obligations by teaching their son right from wrong. It was assumed that part of that would mean telling their child that piracy is wrong. What’s more is that the court also ruled that the parents were not required to monitor their son’s online activities as the plaintiffs argued.



Source : Zach Walton -  Webpronews


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