Star Wars kid suit settled

From Sci-Fi Wire:

"Star Wars kid" Ghyslain Raza, the Canadian teen whose lightsaber fighting was caught on video and posted on the Internet, and his parents reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of three former schoolmates who were sued for making Raza an object of ridicule, the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper reported.

The settlement came on the eve of a civil trial set that had been set to begin April 10, which would have scrutinized one of the world's first and most-publicized cases of cyber-bullying, the newspaper reported.

Raza and his parents had sued for $351,000 in Canadian currency (about $305,000 U.S.), saying that the experience left him unable to attend school. "It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class," Raza said. Specifics of the settlement remain confidential.

The three students accused of circulating the video were Michaël Caron, Jérôme Laflamme and Jean-Michel Rheault. Proceedings against a fourth, François Labarre, were dropped after Raza acknowledged that the allegations against that student were based on hearsay.

Under questioning, Laflamme and Rheault conceded their role in spreading a video that Raza, then 15, had made of himself and left on a shelf in the school TV studio. Laflamme said he discovered the tape in April 2003, when he took school equipment to film a varsity football game. He showed the tape to Rheault, who made a copy of it.

Caron, who said that he didn't even know the two other pranksters, said in examination that as the tape was being e-mailed among students, he created a Web site and posted the video on it.

According to court filings, the video first appeared on the Internet on the evening of April 14, 2003. About a month later, one U.S. Web blog that had posted the video said it had been downloaded 1.1 million times. Raza's lawyer said in a court filing that the video was so widely circulated that one Internet site solely dedicated to the two-minute clip recorded 76 million visits by October 2004.

I meant to post about this last week but i didn't have the time. I'm glad Ghyslain was finally able to get some justice. I know some would argue that he shouldn't have left the tape where it could easily be found but even so, what his classmates did went way too far. Hopefully someday he'll look back on things a little more positively. While the original video made him look really goofy, what many computer geeks did by adding special effects to the original video turned it into something pretty cool. You can find the original video as well as videos with special effects added here. My favorite is the Drunken Jedi Master. There was even a blog that accepted donations for ghyslain when the video first appeared on the net.