What began in June as a reaction to lowbrow Internet postings evolved yesterday in an Allegheny County courtroom into a highbrow, point-counterpoint oral argument -- a debate, still unresolved by Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr., about Pennsylvania's jurisdiction over a Miami-based Web site.

In May, that site, www.dontdatehimgirl.com, allowed anonymous subscribers to post statements about Todd J. Hollis, a Pittsburgh lawyer. Tasha Joseph, a former columnist for The Miami Herald, had created the site to allow spurned women an opportunity to voice grievances about the men who'd wronged them.

Posters' descriptions said Mr. Hollis had herpes, transmitted a sexual disease to a woman, wore dirty clothing and lived in a "dump." Those statements, Mr. Hollis said in a resulting civil lawsuit, were false and defamatory.

He hopes to recover $50,000 in damages.

The question is whether a Pennsylvania court holds jurisdiction in the matter.

"OK, it will probably take a while before I decide this," Judge Wettick said yesterday afternoon, after listening to an hour of back-and-forth.

Jack Orie, the lawyer representing Mr. Hollis, and Robert Byer, representing Ms. Joseph, debated the issue; the former tried to poke holes at the considerable layer of protections afforded to Web sites, and the latter cited the numerous precedents creating that protection in the first place.

The 1996 Communications Decency Act established that a Web site operator is not liable for information posted by another -- a vengeful woman, in this case. When Mr. Hollis noticed the profile, he asked for its removal, but Ms. Joseph refused.

Her power to remove the content, had she desired, should exempt her from the law, Mr. Orie said.

Mr. Byer said the federal government intended, with its loose approach to Internet regulation, to allow the Web to "self-regulate." Mr. Hollis, for instance, could have posted a rebuttal on the site, or created his own Web site countering the charges.

"Congress has been doing its best to keep the law out of the Web," Mr. Byer said after the proceeding. "Maybe it's murky in the sense there's no legal regulation, but to me, that's freedom."

Earlier in the argument, Mr. Byer suggested that Pennsylvania held no jurisdiction over Ms. Joseph. Based on court precedent that created such standards, he said, the Web site neither specifically targets Pennsylvanians nor conducts a significant level of its business in the state.

In the last 1 ¹/₂ years, the site sold six T-shirts -- "to the tune of $200," Mr. Byer said -- to Pennsylvanians. Advertisements provided by Google also provided no direct link to the state.

Mr. Orie argued that someone who has been wronged needs a legal remedy.

"The courts," he said, "need to take some affirmative steps to protect its citizens from defamatory statements."