Commentary

David DeJean
 

A Better Idea In The Spamhaus Case

Last week I wrote in this space that "The Spamhaus-e360Insight Case Isn't Just One Bad Decision, It's Several." The worst of them all was the plaintiff's proposal that the judge order ICANN to pull Spamhaus.org's domain name, which promised to precipitate what some were calling a "constitutional crisis" for the Internet. I'm happy to report that federal judge Charles Kocoras had a better idea: He denied the plaintiff's motion.

Last week I wrote in this space that "The Spamhaus-e360Insight Case Isn't Just One Bad Decision, It's Several." The worst of them all was the plaintiff's proposal that the judge order ICANN to pull Spamhaus.org's domain name, which promised to precipitate what some were calling a "constitutional crisis" for the Internet. I'm happy to report that federal judge Charles Kocoras had a better idea: He denied the plaintiff's motion.Judge Kocoras issued an order on Thursday denying e360Insight's motion. Such a remedy would also cut off all lawful online activities of Spamhaus, he noted, relief that was too broad to be warranted. He also ruled that since there was no indication that either ICANN or Tucows, the registrar for the Spamhaus.org domain, acted in concert with Spamhaus, it was inappropriate to make them parties to the case.

What I find especially interesting in this is that it seems to leave Judge Kocoras without any good way of enforcing his $11.7M judgment against Spamhaus--which would seem to bolster Spamhaus chief Steve Linford's original assertion that the judge lacked jurisdiction to hear the case, at least from a practical point. But then, given what's happening in other areas of the law, like patents and copyright, what's practical and what's legal seem to have less and less relationship to each other.


More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

There are still more shoes to drop in the case, and ultimately the Internet community needs to find a way to help Linford clarify the legality of Spamhaus' actions in blacklisting spammers, because despite what e360Insight might claim, there is such a thing as spam, people don't want it, and Spamhaus plays an important role in helping them kill it.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links