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A school board member failed to convince a New York State court that Google should hand over details about anonymous critics on a Blogger-hosted blog.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman equated ex-Lawrence school district (Nassau County, Long Island) board member Pamela Greenbaum's request for those identities as one that would go against protected speech. The Law.com report said Friedman ruled against Greenbaum's request for the identity of blogger 'Orthomom' and commenters on that blog.

"The relief sought by Greenbaum, on the eve of a school board election, would have a chilling effect on protected political speech," Friedman wrote in her opinion.

Google had agreed to release the information to Greenbaum, provided Orthomom consented to that disclosure. Instead, Orthomom, identified as an Orthodox Jew and a mother of five, intervened to stop that from happening.

Orthomom objected to Greenbaum's stance on the use of public funds to teach private school classes. Blog commenters called Greenbaum a 'bigot'; Greenbaum lost the subsequent election.

"Greenbaum's defamation claim against Orthomom reduces to the insupportable assertion that Orthomom implied that Greenbaum is an anti-semite merely because Orthomom disagreed with Greenbaum's position on the use of public funding for a program that could have affected the Orthodox Jewish community," Friedman wrote.

Though Google's service, Blogger, was at the core of the dispute, their legal counsel did not comment further on the case, according to Law.com.

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