“Pistols at Dawn!” has become “Subpoenas at Noon!” or “Complaints at Teatime!” Today’s legal duelists, armed with dubious lawsuits charging defamation, are B.F. Shaw Printing, the parent company of the Northwest Herald, and Cal Skinner, a blogger.

A federal judge yesterday tentatively acquitted Lori Drew, the Missouri woman convicted for her involvement in a MySpace “cyberbullying” hoax that allegedly resulted in a young girl’s suicide.  If it sticks, the acquittal will help reverse the momentous change in online liability that Drew’s earlier guilty verdict threatened to set in motion.

Tony La Russa's lawsuit against Twitter, which we first published in the Legal Threats Database back on May 29, seems to have hit the mainstream over the past week. Following the path of the case through the Internet and into the mainstream media provides a fascinating case study in the the possibilities of Twitter and other social media platforms for disseminating and amplifying a message.

Shortly after the election last November, a call went out within the conservative blogosphere to use Twitter to organize conservatives online.  Not long thereafter, Michael Patrick Leahy and Rob Neppell started the website Top Conservatives on Twitter and pushed like-minded conservatives to use the Twitter hashtag #TCOT (the # allows twitterers to