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In the suit filed Feb. 24 in New York Supreme Court, University of Albany student Denise Finkel claims she was "greatly injured in her reputation and character" by comments posted in a private group that imply she has AIDS, uses drugs and engages in deviant sexual behavior including bestiality. She is seeking $3 million in damages from Facebook and her former classmates, and is also suing the classmates' parents for negligence.

Finkel's attorney, Mark Altschul, said everyone goes through a certain amount of teasing, but the comments on the wall of this Facebook group went beyond that.

"This discussion that was on Facebook was over-the-top, and it's horrific," he said.

The group — called ".90$ short of a dollar" — was created by one of the defendants in late January 2007 and included about six members who referred to themselves and other classmates at Oceanside High School on Long Island as numbered "cents." Finkel is never named in the group, but the comments and photos reveal that she is the classmate referred to as the "eleventh cent." The group did not show up on members' profile pages and only "admins" could invite new members. Members of the group declined to comment.

It is an unusual claim against Facebook — like other Web sites, it is protected, from liability for its users' content under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which says providers of an interactive computer service can't be treated as the publisher or speaker of users' content. Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told Newsday that the company sees "no merit to this suit and we will fight it vigorously."

However, Altschul said it is his position that Facebook is claiming to be more than just a conduit for users' content. When Finkel and her family came to Altschul with pages printed from the site, he noticed the "c in a little circle" at the bottom of every page — a copyright mark representing authorship, he said.

"They are claiming that they are the owner of the page and the author of the page by having that," Altschul said.

He pointed in contrast to Google, which displays a copyright mark on its homepage but not on pages of search results.

Altschul defended this position in an e-mail to Eric Goldman, an associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and director of the High Tech Law Institute, who wrote a blog post about the lawsuit. Goldman is far from convinced.

"We have a statute that Congress enacted over a dozen years ago to say Web sites aren't liable for third-party content," he said. "The law is crystal clear on that — it's been basically uncontroverted for the last dozen years. Plenty of people have tried to get around it, and they've lost."

That makes suing Facebook a legal mistake, he said, but it is also a tactical mistake to take on the entire site.

"It dilutes the sympathy that we feel toward the plaintiff because it looks like she's pointing the finger in the wrong direction," Goldman said.

When Goldman wrote back to Altschul explaining how a claim against Facebook is unlikely to get very far, the attorney responded undeterred.

"I said, 'That's what they told Brown when he took on Topeka, Kansas,'" Altschul said.