Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at EFF, a San Francisco-based organization that has litigated on issues of bloggers' rights, anonymity, and file sharing among others, believes the court order to shut down the Web sites is "deeply dangerous and wrong," in part, because it was aimed at the entire Web sites and not just the posts or comments in question.

"Imagine if a court could order Amazon.com or Yelp.com shut down because of a disparaging review of a single product," wrote Opsahl, in an analysis .

The case stems from a lawsuit by Apex Technology Group Inc., an Edison, NJ IT services firm, over comments and postings that appeared on several blogs it claims defamed the company. This all may have began sometime this summer when an Apex employment contract affecting H-1B employees appeared on a Web site unrelated to those named in the case.

The contract was removed, but eventually comments and posts complaining about Apex appeared on multiple sites, including ITgrunt.com, EndH1B.com, and GuestWorkerFraud.com, the three sites named in the lawsuit.

Apex is claiming the accusations made on those sites included wrong information that was defamatory and hurting business. It demanded the information be removed and the posters' identity be revealed, which was evidently refused by the site operators.