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Spammers Lose Court Battle Against Univ. of Texas

Posted by timothy on from the eyes-of-texas-aren't-upon-you dept.

voma writes "The University of Texas didn't violate the constitutional rights of an online dating service when it blocked thousands of unsolicited e-mails, a federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday. White Buffalo Ventures, which operates LonghornSingles.com, had appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, saying it had complied with all anti-spam laws."

9 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. The I-CAN-SPAM act says you can by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Can-SPAM act says that it has no effect on the ability of the ISP to filter deny the spammer the ability to use their system. (Section 8(c).).

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    Fight Spammers!
  2. University Of Texas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    It's University of Texas at Austin.. not University of Texas.

  3. Spammer logic by dazed-n-confused · · Score: 5, Informative

    The spammers "legally obtained the email addresses from the University" via an open records request for a list of utex.edu email addresses, then pretended that this meant they'd paid for the "right" to spam anyone associated with the University of Texas. More details here: Texas Attorney General's Office.

    1. Re:Spammer logic by SpecBear · · Score: 2, Informative
      It gets even better than that. They also claimed that compliance with CAN-SPAM not only made their spam legal, it also made blocking that spam illegal (emphasis added by me):
      The company argued that the university violated its constitutional rights by filtering out 59,000 e-mails in 2003. White Buffalo also claimed a federal act that allows certain e-mails superseded the university's anti-spam policy.

      The 5th Circuit panel found that the federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM, does not pre-empt the university's policy and that the policy is permissible under the First Amendment.

      Now that chutzpah. Must be fun being White Buffalo's lawyer, though.
  4. Re:Devil's Advocate by Kiaser+Wilhelm+II · · Score: 4, Informative

    It should be noted that the privacy notations on student records don't apply to military recuriters (and presumably, other government institutions).

    You can think your congressman for this: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05123/498098.stm

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    Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
    Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
  5. Re:Whew! by Cecil · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's strange you got such a significant positive impact. Personally, most of my spam (a whopping 37%) comes from the USA, mostly from cable modems/DSL lines. Excluding Russia and Japan, the rest of asia combined only contributes a paltry 9% of the total. European countries make up most of the other 54%

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    Random and weird software I've written.
  6. FoIA is only part of it - FERPA is the rest by csoto · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Family and Educational Right to Privacy Act trumps FoI at public universities. It stipulates rules about disclosure of information that students have stated are to be protected. The University of Texas does a very good job of protecting this data, at least in the groups that I've worked with.

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    There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
  7. Re:Devil's Advocate by Gogo+Dodo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nowhere does the article say that UT sold the spammers a list of addresses only that it was "legally obtained". In fact, if you read the ZDnet article, it says the spammers got the list "by filing a freedom of information request that gave it nearly all the university's e-mail addresses". UT didn't sell the list.

  8. Re:right to your machine : Wrong analysis by Buran · · Score: 4, Informative

    A phone company is a common carrier. A college/university is not. The phone company is obligated to offer service to everyone. The university is not.

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    i am a soviet space shuttle