Two former restaurant employees won an award of compensatory and punitive damages after being fired for making sexual remarks about customers and managers, discussing violence and illegal drug use, and talking generally about "all the crap/drama/gossip" in their workplace in a MySpace chat room. This may not sound like a winning formula, but here's how the employees made it work:

1. The chat room was private, invitation-only and password-protected. (Managers had gained access only by compelling an employee-member to divulge her password involuntarily.)

2. The employee who maintained the MySpace page and chat room did so only during his off-duty time.

3. No employee accessed the chat room from company computers.

Contrast this with the online activities of many other bored or disgruntled employees, who vent their frustration or anger from their work computers, during work hours and on publicly available forums such as Twitter. (For a glimpse of what a simple TweetDeck search for "porn at work" turns up, see http://ow.ly/1eaZZ.)

(For a summary of the case, entitled Pietrylo v. Hillstone Restaurant Group d/b/a Houston's, see http://ow.ly/1wrgn.)