There was an interesting post on the Media Shift websiter earlier this week about a defamation case involving BookSurge, Amazon.com's print-on-demand service. Basically, when some teenager in Maine got herself convicted of a hate crime against another cheerleader, the first girl's parents wrote a book about the whole sordid mess and published it through BookSurge, so the second girl sued the family, the freelance writer who'd worked on the project, and BookSurge—who filed a motion for dismissal on the grounds that it was not the "publisher" of the book, at least as defamation law understands and precisely defines that term. And the court agreed:

"Under the common law, whether a participant is deemed to be a publisher for purposes of imposing defamation liability depends on the 'extent to which he participates with an author... of the defamatory statement in its publication,' according to the court's ruling in this case. Actors who are 'more actively involved' in the process may be held liable 'because they have the opportunity to know the content of the material being published.'"

Since BookSurge never really looked at the material submitted for printing, the court decided, it could not be held liable for any defamatory content in that material. And now that the broader case has been settled out of court, this particular ruling stands until some other court rules differently.