Justene Adamec over at Calblog has been threatened with a defamation suit due to some of the 3rd party comments on one of her posts. Apparently, she had a run-in with a telemarketer who asserted that she had ordered a business directory from them, and was billing her for the unwanted, and says Justene, unordered book.
Then the message-board posts came in. First a number of other people who also had similar issues with the same company posted their experience. Then one or more individuals who claimed to be former employees of said telemarketing firm posted rather negative comments about the firm, using bogus email addresses. [Note: Movable Type, which Justene and I both use, does not validate the domain names (let alone email addresses) of posters. I'd like to see DNS checking, MT.] THEN a person purporting to work at said company (also using a false email address) flamed the other posters. Then things got out of hand.
Now the telemarketing firm thinks that they can sue Justene, who doesn't need this level of tsuris. Go read the posts here.
Findlaw is a wonderful service with a poor search engine. But two cases stand out: One is a 9th Circuit case affirming the availability of an anti-SLAPP defense (Batzel v. Smith AKA Batzel v. Cremers) (via Patterico) and the other is a 4th Circuit case (Zeran v America Online, Inc) affirming the immunity of message board providers against responsibility for 3rd-party defamatory comments on their boards even if they are informed by the allegedly-defamed party that there are problems with a particular post and do not remove it. The governing law is apparrently the Communications Decency Act of 1996 ("CDA") -- 47 U.S.C. § 230.
Gold stars to anyone who can find more. Send info to Justene at her blog. She'd especially like to hear from lawyers with experience in this area.
See also XRLQ
UPDATE: Justene has decided to delink the comments to the post in question, as she is going out of town and wants to avoid an ongoing problem while away. But the thread in question is reposted in full on XRLQ's post above.