Electronic Frontier Foundation:  “Over the holidays, a New Jersey court issued an order requiring upstream providers to shut down three anti-H1-B websites that is deeply dangerous and wrong. The order not only tries to remove allegedly defamatory messages but also requires a complete shutdown of the websites and even purports to require the cooperation of the hosting companies and domain registrars of the websites to do so and for other service providers to identify anonymous speakers.  The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Apex Technology Group, is a staffing and consulting services company.”

The Digital Media Lawyer Blog:  “Internet defamation law update:  Courts around the U.S. regularly grant requests by plaintiffs to force publishers to disclose the identity of anonymous bloggers — albeit, often not until the plaintiff has jumped over some rather stringent procedural hurdles.  However, in a recent case, a federal judge in Missouri denied such a request, on the grounds that the plaintiff’s need for the blogger’s testimony did not outweigh the blogger’s First Amendment right of anonymity . Sedersten v. Taylor, W.D.Mo., 6:09-cv-03031 . . . . This decision is not an outlier, but represents principles governing such cases that are recognized by most courts.”

The Digital Media Lawyer Blog:  “The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, 18 U.S.C. § 1030) is a broadly written statute permits private citizens to recover damages for a wide variety of computer-related injuries.  I use the amorphous term ‘computer-related,’ because CFAA permits recoveries for wrongful acts committed against computers, or for wrongful acts committed using computers.  In some cases, CFAA may permit recovery for acts that have not been recognized under state law — such as the unauthorized accessing or obtaining information from a computer.  Use of CFAA can also permit a plaintiff to bring her suit in federal court, a favorable litigation strategy under many circumstances.  The CFAA was originally written as a criminal statute, and only secondarily extended to permit private claims.  And, it imposes a series of hurdles — in my view, small hurdles — that must be crossed on civil claims.  A recent dismissal of a CFAA class action suit provides an excellent guide to these minimum requirements.”