WHERE THE FUN IS STILL MOSTLY IN THE COMMENTS . . . In news that's good for weblogs like Legal Underground, a federal judge has applied Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to rule that web publishers cannot be sued for libel on the basis of anonymous comments posted on their websites.

In DiMeo v. Max (pdf), Judge Stewart Dalzell wrote--

Absent federal statutory protection, interactive computer services would essentially have two choices: (1) employ an army of highly trained monitors to patrol (in real time) each chatroom, message board, and blog to screen any message that one could label defamatory, or (2) simply avoid such a massive headache and shut down these fora. Either option would profoundly chill Internet speech.

For more information about the case, see "Bloggers Entitled to Immunity Under the Communications Act," by Shannon P. Duffy at Law.com. Although the defendant in the case didn't have a weblog exactly--it was really just a message board--Professor Eric Goldman writes that "the reasoning applies 100% to comments to blog posts, so this case does reinforce the likelihood that courts will protect blog operators from liability for their users' comments."