This will definitely be an upcoming story on Digg and tons of blogs, because up until now there hasn’t been many lawsuits similar to this! Shoemoney.com is an amazing blog which is run by Jeremy Shoemaker who discusses a ton of topics related to SEO and marketing. However, he was recently subpoenad for displaying a comment submitted by a visitor to his site!

Basically, one of his visitors left a comment on his blog saying something about another company and that company is putting up a subpoena against Shoemoney.com because of the comment (from what I understand).

Dillsmack (Shoemoney’s coder) said that the blog comment they are being subpoenaed over should still be on the blog, if anyone could dig that up, it would be great!

Now this definitely raises a bit of controversy over the matter. I personally think “freedom of speech” should be enough to win his case, even though he didn’t leave the comment. But others believe that since he does moderate the comments and chooses which comments appear in the comments section of his post, he is held liable over what appears on his site (which does make a pretty valid point).

Blogcritics and BBC News also seem to agree with the last point in a way as well.

Now people might ask why Yahoo! Message Board hasn’t been sued yet (since they are bigger fish than Shoemoney and can bring in more money)? This is probably because:

Yahoo’s claim is that they just provide the space and don’t act as editors which approve comments.

He hasn’t reveled too much information about this yet, but forums have started receiving news about this and the Digg community bought his story to the front page already!