XS4ALL Wins Anti-Spam Suit

johnpc writes: "In a court case started by Dutch ISP XS4ALL, a judge ruled yesterday that spam outfit AbFab is forbidden to send spam to all subscribers of said ISP. The judge writes: 'The essential point is that XS4ALL has no legal conveyance obligation. (...) XS4ALL does not wish to convey messages which its customers have not asked to receive and therefore does not wish these messages to be delivered through its systems, in this case from Abfab. The question of whether the unsolicited sending of large volumes of advertising messages by e-mail should be referred to as 'spam' or 'electronic direct marketing' is not relevant to this dispute.' This is obviously not a solution to the spam problem within the Netherlands, but it is a step in the right direction. You can read an english abstract of the ruling. Unfortunately, most of the actual case documents are in dutch, some of which are still being translated."

Comments

The ruling is not about SPAM.

[www.sorehands.com]

The ruling is more about rights of an ISP to control its own system. The approaches what the appeals court ruled in Intel v. Hamibi.

Similar rulings in the United States would start detailing the landscape of rights of website owners to keep SPAMMERS from scraping.