Professor's Web posting at center of libel suit

CNET News.com: "When Donald Mayer placed a student's essay on Oakland University's Web site as an example for others taking his graduate-level business class, he probably never thought he'd end up in court as a result.

But thanks to Google's all-encompassing reach, Mayer and the university were named as defendants in a libel lawsuit that the Michigan Appeals Court decided earlier this month.


Donald Mayer
Professor,
Oakland University The student's essay, the product of a class assignment, alleged ethical and legal lapses at his former employer, an industrial automation firm called Ben-Tech. An executive at that company had urged student Eric Kaczor to purloin "all relevant materials, such as software and documentation," from Siemens and bring them to his new job at Ben-Tech, the paper asserted.

A decade ago, that discussion of business mores might have begun and ended inside Mayer's classroom on the Rochester, Mich., campus of Oakland University. But because Mayer posted the essay on the school's Web site, and because the site was open to the entire Internet, Google's voracious spiders soon discovered it.

After redacting Kaczor's name, Mayer posted the rest of the essay in January 2002 as an example for other students in his current class. Two months later, Ben-Tech demanded that Oakland University remove the paper and offer a retraction. "