Court Rules WHOIS Privacy Illegal For Spammers 169
Unequivocal writes "Spammers hiding behind a WHOIS privacy service have been found in violation of CAN-SPAM. It probably won't stop other spammers from hiding (what can?), but at least it adds another arrow in the legal quiver for skewering the bottom feeders. Quoting from the article: 'A recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has determined that using WHOIS privacy on domains may be considered "material falsification" under federal law... Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act. This is an important decision that members of the domain community should refer to prior to utilizing a privacy shield.'"
Re:SPAM contents still a secret (Score:2, Informative)
Meh, the whole article is irrelevant. Once it gets to the Supreme Court, they'll just say we're restricting spammers' freedom of speech.
No. Your freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to harass other people. You can use use your rights so far as they don't violate anybody else's.
Re:Problem (Score:4, Informative)
It's not that privacy is illegal...it's that privacy + spamming = violation. CAN-SPAM, for all its toothlessness, requires valid contact information for the domains involved in mass emails, so using anonymized WHOIS entries is right out if you're sending mass emails. This is, I think, perfectly fine. If you're going to be contacting millions of people, it's only fair that they should be able to contact you back.
That says noting about your ability to run a small business with anonymized WHOIS off a small DSL line...as long as you're not sending mass emails around, your WHOIS anonymity will never run afoul of the spam laws.
Re:The first amendment is dead and buried... (Score:5, Informative)
Spammers aren't shouting on their own property. They are shouting on mine. They are, in effect, stealing from me.
There is no such thing as 'natural rights.' Natural rights are a type of con, by asserting your natural rights you are arguing from authority, your assertion that certain rights are 'natural' means it would be unnatural to oppose such rights. In the end, though, natural rights don't matter. The only things that matters are the rights that the majority agree to uphold. If no one agrees with your assessment of what constitutes a natural right, you can whine about it all you like, but it won't change anything.
You don't have the right to yell 'fire!' in a crowded theater, incite a riot, or deliberately and maliciously spread damaging falsehoods. You don't have the right to lob garbage into my yard, even if that garbage consists of your poetry, written on napkins. In the same vein, you don't have the right to send me unsolicited commercial faxes, or to spam me.
What kind of ridiculous slipper slope must you concoct to imagine that CAN-SPAM will have 'very dangerous consequences?' Has the law against unsolicited commercial faxing had such consequences?
Re:Problem (Score:3, Informative)
So along come these anonymization services so we can have an online presence without giving up our privacy -- and now that's been declared illegal?
From the header:
Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
Cough. You were saying?