A federal court has upheld the immunity of "bloggers and message board operators" from lawsuits brought against commenters. From ACSBlog:

In Universal Communication Systems v. Lycos, a company who had allegedly been victimized by defamatory statements on a message board regarding the value of its stock sued Lycos, which operated the board. The message board allowed users to post comments with minimal moderation, and no one from Lycos was responsible for the allegedly defamatory statements.

Examining the impact of Sec. 230 [of the Communications Decency Act] on this case, the court noted that "Congress intended that, within broad limits, message board operators would not be held responsible for the postings made by others on that board," adding that allowing bloggers and message board operators to be sued for the statements of commenters on their sites would have an "obvious chilling effect" on speech. Accordingly, the court dismissed the complaint against Lycos.

I can't imagine that this lawsuit would ever have been successful. However, I was curious about this issue because someone recently e-mailed me claiming he had Googled his own name and came across comments on this blog that were attributed to him. He suggested that he was willing to file a lawsuit "if amends are not made."

I've been inundated with comment spam recently, deleting over 20,000 comments in the last couple of days, so I'm assuming one of the spammers used this guys name. I never found his name in the comments section, so he may have been a con artist himself, hoping that by threatening me with a lawsuit he could convince me to cough up a little money. Either way, it's good to know nothing could come of a lawsuit.

Here's a link to the decision (PDF).