I've been watching this lawsuit in Texas unfold.

In the case linked in the first paragraph, Lyndal Harrington (a Texas real estate agent and grandmother who says she started blogging in her spare time when the bottom dropped out of the real estate market) is being sued for defamation, and was actually jailed for contempt of court when she claimed her computer had been stolen and she couldn't turn it over to authorities.

There have been a number of lawsuits in the last couple of years, challenging bloggers and commenters with charges of defamation, and some legal experts are expressing concern for continues free speech on the internet. The article asserts that "Lawsuits against bloggers in the United States have been doubling every year since 2004 with 15 million dollars in judgments so far against them, according to Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association."

A quick glance at the Electronic Frontier Foundation website reveals several currently ongoing Free Speech cases, cases including baseless and false copyright claims and bogus DMCA takedowns—which can result in content being removed, lawsuits, and in some cases seizure of hardware.

If you're a blogger, you need to know about the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: "A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics." Chilling Effects has an excellent FAQ about defamation, and some suggestions about how to stay on the right side of the law, even if you're expressing pungent opinions.

The excellent section about internet anonymity explains intelligently why your apparent ability to post under a pseudonym isn't nearly as much protection as it may appear to be:

"Companies angry about comments criticizing them on public message boards, for example, have found that they can simply file a civil lawsuit with vague, unsupported claims, then issue a subpoena to the discussion's host ISP demanding the identity of the speaker. These subpoenas have effectively shut off discussion in many public forums. ISPs have recently begun to notify their subscribers when they receive these subpoenas, giving them at least a limited opportunity to object. Yet still, many subscribers do not respond in time and their identities are turned over with no analysis of whether their speech actually caused any harm."

As American Bloggers, where does Freedom of Speech stand if anyone can not only file a claim of defamation against you simply because they don't like something you say on the internet, but have the courts seriously entertain the charges? Because regardless of whether such a charge is eventually found baseless, the very real threat of a suit, of having your hardware seized in a search of your home or office, and the hassle of having your site shut down by an ISP served with a cease-and-desist and a subpoena for your real name and address . . . well, just that threat has a seriously "chilling effect" on what you may be willing to talk about or what discussions you're willing to host.

The original subpoena against Harrington apparently demanded:

You know what? Just the very fact that you can get sued for having a strong opinion, expressing it in a comment on your own or someone else's blog, and you can GO TO JAIL charged with contempt for failing to produce your computer for a bunch of strangers to dredge through? That's frankly scary. If bloggers are judged to be publishers and held to the same standards as someone like the New York Times, then free speech in this county will suffer a devastating blow.