A look at the term "Cyberbullying"

The first usage of the term "cyberbullying" that I found was in a scholarly article published in fall of 2001. The article was entiled "Culture Wars on the Net:Intellectual Property and Corporate Propriety in Digital Environments" was written by Rosemary J. Coombe and Andrew Herman. Surprising this term was used in a very different context than it is used in today. In the article the term "cyberbullying" was used to refer to large companies taking legal action against individuals who use copyrighted material on the internet. The example that the article gives is Warner Brothers placing a cease-and-desist order against two fifteen-year-old's who used Harry Potter character names in a URL. The first instance of "cyberbullying" in a newspaper was an article published in January of 2005 entitled "Call Spidey With Problems. Spano Has His Number." This article, which was written to announce an anti-bullying summit, uses the term as we would today. It gives the definition of "cyberbullying" as "kids saying nasty stuff about other kids, not on the bathroom wall as we did, but online."