Google has lost a defamation suit in Australia, which could have bigger ramifications for how it handles situations when people complain about search results. A man from Melbourne sued the search giant after he tried to get Google to remove …

Getting into Twitter spats can be an expensive undertaking, especially once you move away from common insults and arrive at the stage of libel and defamation. Just ask Courtney Love. Perhaps the most famous widow in music history had a …

UPDATE: Horizon Realty, the company suing their former tenant over a tweet, is now a trending topic on Twitter. Some Twitterers feel the company has effectively killed their reputation. What do you think?

A California man named Christopher Norberg is in the middle of a legal dispute with a chiropractor for posting a negative review of his services on the site Yelp.com. The dispute stems from a billing experience, which Norberg referred to in his review, and the chiropractor filed a defamation suit. It is now a classic example of where the line between free speech and defamation should be drawn.

Brian Retkin of domain registrar Dotworlds had been criticized for offering .USA domains for sale and spamming people with sales pitches after September 11, 2001. He has claimed Google’s links to this criticism amounts to defamation.

March was a busy month for lawsuits involving bloggers and webmasters. The court system taking them to task for defamatory statements, with one case becoming the first to go to trial and result in a liability verdict.

A legal system once tentative about taking on digital cases is braving the waters with more frequency. Most of the cases we’ve reported on have involved the statements of anonymous commentators, liability for which webmasters and bloggers have been repeatedly exonerated (or are expected to be). But these are different.

A California blogger becomes one of the latest to be dragged into court after an inflammatory blog post. A brief tale about tracking down a spammer, which also held the accused personal contact information, won Jerry Baker a defamation lawsuit. The case also illustrates the potential pitfalls of Internet research.

KinderStart will amend its complaint against Google for effectively dropping the KinderStart website from its index when Google assigned the company a zero PageRank.

Blogger Lance Dutson earned a victory against Warren Kremer Paino Advertising as the ad agency dropped its lawsuit against the web developer who criticized their business with the state of Maine.