Judge Rules In Favor Of Spamhaus

Waylon writes "U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras has ruled in favor of The Spamhaus Project. e360 Insight responded on its homepage, saying the judge's ruling was 'a devastating loss of personal freedom for all U.S. citizens'. As opposed to shutting down a voluntary service which tries to mitigate the millions of unsolicited emails that e360 Insight pumps out every single day." From the article: "In his order, Judge Kocoras wrote that the relief e360insight sought is 'too broad to be warranted in this case' and that suspending the domain name would 'cut off all lawful online activities of Spamhaus, not just those that are in contravention' of the default judgment. He also called e360insight's motion one that 'does not correspond to the gravity of the offending conduct.'"

Comments

"a devastating loss of personal freedom for..."

[The MAZZTer]

Way to go down kicking and screaming inanities...

Re:"a devastating loss of personal freedom for..."

[BlogPope]

Well Spamhaus said their demise would be the end of the internet, so its basically kids in the play ground.

Well, they are the ONLY Real Time Black list on the internet, which of course is the ONLY anti-spam measure available to mail admins, and I'm pretty sure email traffic volumes are orders of magnitude larger than other protocols, such as http & Bitorrent.

So yeah, I agree with Slashdot in agreein with Spamhaus on the horros to be unleashed if this order had gone through.

Re:"a devastating loss of personal freedom for..."

[jaygridley]

Anyone notice that the case is referred to as Spamhaus v e360Insight on their main page? Kinda implies that they're the victim.

More at stake than just SPAM...

[Chabil Ha']

I really think that the judge realized that more was at stake than just SPAM. It has set an important precedant regarding the Internet and jurisdiction. Even though the US controls most of it, it is important to realize that the Internet is an ethereal place without solid jurisdictional boundaries. If the judge had signed away on pulling the domain name, it would have casted a devastating taint on how Law treats 'where' the Interent exactly is.

Re:Go to the source

[Gorshkov]

Please, for the sake of fairness, please go to the e360insight website Read for yourself what they have to say. Consider it carefully, go back later to gain additional insights. (Heh, I said insights.)

Un-bloody-real .... I went and visited the poor benighted spammers. I couldn't resist the urge - I clicked on the "contact us" link. ANd what's the first thing it did? They wanted my EMAIL address.

Well, they can contact me at dream-freaking@on.com - that's the one I gave when I posted the following comment to what they had on the link supplied:

First - if you think I'm going to give a spammer my email address, you're sadly mistaken.

Second - spamhaus, as you very well know, doesn't block a damned thing - individual mail admins - like ME - decide ON OUR OWN if we want to take their recommendations or not.

And before you get pissy about a UK organisation ignoring a USA court, just thank god that they have, and that they CAN - becuase otherwise you'd be hauled to court in every country that had decent anti-spam legislation.

And I'm pretty sure that you'd consider THAT to be an affront to the liberties of every red-blooded american as well, wouldn't you?

Re:Go to the source

[tomhudson]

Just a quick note ... their contact form script requires a valid email address. Why not use nospam@360insight.com ... or admin@360insight.com, etc.

Re:The straight dope

[JustNiz]

If the US started doing that, it wouldn't take long before the rest of the world stopped using ICANN's top-level domain, and effectively put the whole US on a subnet of some even higher level non-US domain.

Re:The straight dope

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if the judge had ordered ICANN (an American corporation) to pull the plug on the domain, it most definitely would have affected them, regardless of the physical jurisdiction of the court.

Actually, even if the judge ordered ICANN to suspend their domain, ICANN would not be able to comply, because it is not within ICANN's power to do so.

The judge could order the registrar to pull the domain though.

The amount of power the US could potentially have over the Internet is rather frightening

The US has minimal power over the internet. The internet is a set of standards for computer networks. The US has some power over some domain names because the companies that manage these domain names are located in the US.

And should the US abuse its position, I'm sure other countries will compensate. Why does ICANN have such power? Because internet users say that they do. Why are the DNS roots authoritative? Because internet users say that they are. Should a critical mass of internet users disagree, then they lose this power.

Despite all the bitching about ICANN, generally speaking, they do a decent job. Certainly far better than the UN/ITU proposals to bring it under the control of the dictator's debating club on the east river.

Re:Whew

[swd2]

Sure you could have handled it, To be honest Spamhaus is mostly using other peoples dnsrbl's anyway. I get alot more out of tqmcube.com or cbl.abuseat.org than the Spamhaus's.
Plus you should never be rejecting from these lists anyway, just scoring and allowing your users to decide what should be rejected.

This ruling is PRO freedom of speech

[merc]

The freedom of speech also means the freedom to NOT listen to speech.

This is a win for those who believe in property rights.

My servers. My rules.

Re:Go to the source

[Tim C]

I clicked on the "contact us" link. ANd what's the first thing it did? They wanted my EMAIL address.

Well, yeah; presumably they think you want to contact them so as to set up a dialogue with them, not a monologue. They may be stupid, no good lowlife spamming shits, but expecting an email address as part of a contact form is perfectly reasonable. (Not that I'd give them mine, of course, but that's beside the point)

Well, they can contact me at dream-freaking@on.com

This was one of my biggest pet hates a couple of years ago - people using syntactically-legal addresses on real domains that are nothing to do with them. Same goes for the guy who used an address at yeahright.com, which is also a registered domain.

What if that's an actual, valid email address and you've just condemned some poor schmuck to even more spam? If you wouldn't trust a site with your own email address, don't trust it with a potentially valid one either; use a "fake but possible" tld (such as .tld, .ab.cd, etc) instead.