• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 3, 2011

Facebook was hit with another potential class-action lawsuit this week for allegedly using minors' names and images in ads without their parents' permission.

This case, brought in federal district court in the Southern District of Illinois on behalf of two underage Facebook users in that state, is at least the fourth lawsuit filed against the social networking service for allegedly using minors in ads. Other cases are pending in federal court in New York and California and in state court in Los Angeles.

The lawsuits center on Facebook's "like" button. The users all allege that Facebook transforms people who "like" particular brands or ads into endorsers of those companies by sharing that information with users' friends. Doing so, they argue, violates various state laws banning the use of people's likenesses in ads without their consent or, in the case of minors, their parents' consent.

"One way in which Facebook works to increase its user-base and response rate and thus its advertising revenues is by using the names and likenesses of its users to advertise its services and other products," the Illinois users' parents, Melissa Dawes and Jennifer DeYoung, allege in their court papers. "Facebook accomplishes this by collecting personal information from its users, (name, picture, friends, brand preferences), combining that information with additional information provided by its paid advertisers and applying that data to Facebook designed templates to produce its 'targeted' or 'enhanced' advertisements.

Despite the wave of litigation, the legal issues are murky.

Many of the laws prohibiting misappropriation of names by advertisers were enacted long before anyone envisioned the rise of social-networking sites. For that reason, it's not clear that Facebook's transmittal of information about users' "likes" will even be considered an ad.

In addition, laws that limit Facebook's ability to publish information about teens' likes could violate the teens' free speech rights. Facebook itself is making that argument in Los Angeles, where it is seeking dismissal of the lawsuit. "When a Facebook user says that he or she likes certain content -- whether it is a brand, a product, a political candidate, or a cause -- that user is communicating to his or her friends an affinity for that content," the company says in its court papers. "There can be no dispute that the user's friends have an interest in receiving that communication."

The social-networking company additionally argues that even if the "like" buttons are considered ads, it's immune from liability under the federal Communications Decency Act. That law broadly says that interactive platforms aren't responsible for actions by users. "Facebook provides neutral tools that permit users to post information to the Web site, but it is users who determine what information to post," the company argues.

But a federal appellate court in California ruled in a separate case that Web sites can't claim immunity when they structure their platforms in a way that elicits potentially unlawful material for business purposes. In that case, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Roommates.com couldn't claim immunity for unlawful housing ads posted by users.