All Your Accounts Will Be Verified

How can the future have a government-regulated reputation market if you can’t express copyright in your online persona(e)? California leads the way starting this brave new year, in which all your accounts are verified: it’s now illegal to impersonate people online for nefarious purposes. Specifically: one is a criminal if one “knowingly and without consent credibly impersonates another actual person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person.” I think the trick will be in the issue of “harm”? And possibly “defraud”? I mean the good news is that bad things will have a legal foothold: most online impersonation and harassment seems to be part of larger campaign of harassing and/or attacking women. So for purposes of like, harm as in stalking? Good! But harm as in “brand dilution” — that is what will be prosecuted. Of course there is no carve-out for playful, political or non-murderous uses of online impersonation, and so, before this winds up in courts for refinement, it certainly seems like a stepping stone to our future regulated online identities. Just go ahead and trademark yourself now and get it over with — that way you don’t have to wait for the law to catch up to your personal brand online.