The popular news and comment forum site Topix has recently come into the mainstream media and legal spotlights for its part in what may be a revolution in anonymous speech across the Internet. 

What began as an open forum discussing the published allegations against a Texas couple in their rural town quickly spiraled into something much, much more heated. Even thought the couple was ultimately found not guilty on charges of sexual assault, comments were flying fast and furious across the forums accusing the couple of everything from pedophilia to drug abuse.

In an effort to combat these postings, the Texas couple became the latest case in a recent spate of folks who are suing the Internet. Turning their attentions to Topix, they are suing the site to release information about individual commenters and their identities. The 365 page lawsuit identities 178 anonymous commenters, individuals alleged to have posted defamatory comments about the couple. The couple is basing their complaint on the claims that the posts lead to a sullying of their reputations online, as well as causing a downturn in their offline businesses. Since Topix allows both registered and unregistered comments to be posted on its forums, it is likely that much of the information will be nothing more than IP addresses, which will then have to be tracked back to individual ISPs to identify actual users.

Reputation.com CEO, Michael Fertik, spoke to ABCNews.com about the current state of law, saying “The law as it currently stands is an accomplice because it creates no incentive whatsoever for Web sites to review or police themselves from content that is potentially devastating to real people and real lives.” Basically, Topix has no obligation under current laws to take down the offensive content, and without a change to the current laws governing free speech on the Internet the law essentially enables anonymous online defamation.

A quick survey of the case law in this area reveals that the law is certainly evolving. In 2008, two students at Yale Law School won a court case that ordered AutoAdmit.com, a college and graduate school admissions Web forum, to reveal the IPs of anonymous posters who libeled the women online. Three years prior a Delaware court denied a request to unmask a blogger charged with defamation by a local councilman. There is certainly no hard and fast rule about free speech and the Internet, but the general consensus is that if anonymous comments are found to be defamatory by a court, that court can command the Web site to supply any significant information it has about the posters.