[Poohbah]

Has Mr. Schiavo asked any party for a retraction?

IIRC, once he does that, he has a limited time period to act. A wise strategery would be to collect as much evidence as possible before striking.

How many parties in the Unites States would he need to pursue?

At first, he'd only have to pursue FR to divulge the names of the posters in question, then their ISPs.

From there? Who knows? Maybe it's only 20-30 people on FR, posting under multiple nics...

[nickcarraway]

You think that FR is the only place in the United States that has people criticizing Mr. Schiavo? If it's going on here, it's going on all over. Mr. Schiavo is going to have to do some extensive work all over the country just to get here. Besides that, he's going to have to prove damages. But before he gets to the level of FR, he'd have to sue all the nationwide media people. How can he argue that a web site creates damages, but all those cases didn't. Is there even any evidence to show Mr. Schiavo even knows about FR? I would say he has tons of legal problems without opening more.

[nickcarraway]

Do you have any idea how hard libel suits are? Do you know how many libel suits there are every year, and their sucess rates. I'd like to see the precentage of potentially libelous statements made to those that end up in courts.