A New Jersey judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit against Jimmy Wales's Wikimedia Foundation, owner of Wikipedia.

The case centered around statements made about literary agent Barbara Bauer which called her one of the "dumbest of the twenty worst" agents and claimed she had "no documented sales at all."

The Electronic Freedom Foundation assisted with the defense of Wikimedia and successfully argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protected Wikimedia from liability of its users' comments because it is an operator of an "interactive computer service."

It's unclear why lawyers continue to file defamation lawsuits against big companies over user comments when they, nearly without fail, all get tossed out. Oh, wait, I know: they want the payday.

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