Eric Goldman tipped me off to a defamation lawsuit filed yesterday against Google and the anonymous bloggers behind Encyclopedia of American Loons by Uri Dowbenko, described in a blog post as a "batshit insane tinfoilhatter."
Google presumably will have little trouble getting the claim against it dismissed under 42 U.S.C. § 230(c), despite Dowbenko's as yet unsubstantiated assertion that the bloggers are "Google employees and/or blog writers." Assuming Dowbenko goes forward anyway and seeks to subpoena the bloggers' identities, it will be interesting to see which of the statements in the allegedly defamatory blog post are claimed to be false statements of fact. The post includes some statements that are clearly mere opinions (albeit insulting and perhaps gratuitous), and others that are factual but apparently accurate (at least based upon the sources that they link to, including this). The complaint does contain a general claim that the blog post falsely attributes some statements to Dowbenko, but it's not clear to me precisely which of the statements in the post are asserted to be defamatory.
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