NEW YORK — Parodies, pranks and freewheeling Internet discussion are at risk in a criminal case against a man accused of using online aliases to discredit his father's rivals in a debate over the Dead Sea Scrolls, his lawyer said on Nov. 4.

Such tactics may be irritating, but they're not crimes, attorney Ronald Kuby argued in legal papers asking a court to throw out nearly all the criminal charges against Raphael Golb. The court hasn't yet ruled.

Golb was charged earlier this year with impersonating one of his professor father's adversaries to color debate about the Dead Sea Scrolls. He has pleaded not guilty to identity theft, criminal impersonation and other charges.

After drawing attention to an abstruse-but-vigorous dispute over the scrolls' origin, the case is now delving into the evolving legal landscape surrounding phony online identities.

Internet impersonation has generated various lawsuits, but prosecutions are far less common in cases that don't involve claims that the assumed identity was used to steal money, said Sam Bayard, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

"It's usually very difficult to fit this into a (criminal) legal pigeonhole," he said.

Found in the 1940s in Israel, the more than 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls include the earliest known version of portions of the Hebrew Bible. They have shed important light on Judaism and the origins of Christianity.

Many scholars say the scrolls were assembled by an ancient Jewish group, the Essenes. Golb's father, Norman Golb, a University of Chicago professor of Jewish history, and some others say the writings were the work of a range of Jewish sects and communities. The debate is insular but notoriously heated.

Taking aim at his father's detractors — particularly New York University Judaic studies chairman Lawrence Schiffman — Raphael Golb opened an e-mail account in Schiffman's name, the Manhattan District Attorney's office said.

Golb, an attorney, used the account to send NYU officials messages in which Schiffman purportedly admit plagiarizing scroll scholarship, prosecutors said. They say he also used other aliases to promote his father's ideas and criticize others'.

Golb contests sending the e-mails. But whoever did was just pulling an "intellectual prank" and expressing ideas protected by free-speech rights, Kuby argues.

"An attempt to influence a public, academic debate by e-mails and blog postings authored under assumed names cannot be an object of criminal" laws designed to protect people from fraud, threats or physical harm, Kuby wrote.

Otherwise, prosecutors could target "a vast array of online activities," from parody sites to blog comments made under aliases, he wrote.

The easy anonymity of the Internet has given rise to plenty of claims and concerns about malicious impersonation — and at least some criminal cases.

A Missouri mother, Lori Drew, was accused of posing as a teen boy on the MySpace social-networking site to send flirtatious, and later hurtful, messages to a 13-year-old neighbor girl who committed suicide.

A federal jury in California, where MySpace has its servers, convicted Drew of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization, but a judge overturned the verdict and acquitted her earlier this year.

Other online-alias cases have landed in civil courts. St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa sued the microblogging site Twitter in May over an unauthorized page that used his name, saying it caused him emotional distress by making light of such things as the recent deaths of two Cardinals pitchers. He dropped the case in June.