Short answers, pulled from the story.
The SPEECH Act is a 2010 United States federal law that makes foreign defamation judgments unenforceable in American courts. A foreign libel ruling can only be enforced in the United States if the foreign country's law offers at least as much free speech protection as the First Amendment, or if the defendant would have been found liable under American law.
The SPEECH Act was passed in response to the practice of libel tourism, where plaintiffs choose foreign courts with more plaintiff-friendly defamation laws to sue American authors or journalists. The law was directly inspired by the legal battle between Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Saudi businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz over her 2003 book Funding Evil.
President Barack Obama signed the SPEECH Act into law on the 10th of August 2010. It was passed unanimously by both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 111th United States Congress.
Pontigon v. Lord, heard in Missouri courts in April 2011, was the first case to address the SPEECH Act's application. The first appellate-level ruling under the Act came in Trout Point Lodge v. Doug K. Handshoe, which found a Nova Scotia defamation judgment unenforceable in the United States.
Legal scholars writing in the Roger Williams Law Review and the Journal of International and Comparative Law of the Chicago-Kent College of Law have argued that the Act is overly broad and fails to distinguish between legitimate forum selection and illegitimate forum shopping. Critics also note that the Act creates no right to damages for defendants, unlike stronger provisions in the proposed Free Speech Protection Act of 2009 that did not pass.
In 2017, the Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully invoked the SPEECH Act in EFF v. Global Equity. The EFF had called Global Equity "a classic patent troll," prompting Global Equity to file a defamation action in a South Australian court, which issued an injunction. American courts ruled that enforcing that foreign judgment would violate First Amendment protections under the SPEECH Act.