This controversial case has now the potential of leading to some serious legal reconsideration of lying about one’s online identity. At least that is the impression created by the numerous questions raised by the guilty verdict reached in Lori Drew’s case, this Wednesday.

The 49-year-old woman used a fake online persona (a teenage boy) on MySpace to send positive, then negative messages to Megan Meier, aged 13. Not long after one such message (“The world would be a better place without you.”), the girl committed suicide. Drew’s motivation for harrowing her seems to be that her own daughter’s relationship to Megan had turned sour.

It seems that, in this particular case, using a fake Internet ID became a tool for hurting someone, and it is this implied right to anonymity that is now questioned. “It will be interesting to see if issues of safety and security will eventually trump the hallmark ideology of free, largely anonymous or pseudonymous participation in cyberspace,” says Sameer Hinduja (according to the New York Times), who teaches criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University.

MySpace’s terms of service do specify that the registration information submitted by users must be “truthful and accurate”, and the prosecutors used this to accuse Lori Drew of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which effectively places her on par with hackers and other such computer criminals.

So, should users now worry of breaking the law when submitting false registration data to sites such as MySpace? M. Grossman, senior legal policy analyst working for the Heritage Foundation, believes so, even if chances are slim that sites will radically change their policy.

The next episode of this drama will be played next month, when George H. Wu, the judge assigned to the case, will hear motions for its dismissal. One of the arguments used by the defense is that Ms. Drew actually never read in great detail MySpace’s terms of service – which is eerily true for almost all Internet users.