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.'"
Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
WHOIS privacy was created in the first place to protect us from spammers (the WHOIS database being ripe for email address scraping). Then the spammers took advantage of it to protect themselves from justice.
It seems like there's some kind of insightful point to be made here, but I'm not sure what it is.
Re:The first amendment is dead and buried... (Score:5, Interesting)
Conspiracy/aiding/abetting? (Score:3, Interesting)
Couldn't the WHOIS service, by hosting spammers, be held liable for criminal conspiracy or aiding and abetting?
Or at least investigated to determine if they were knowingly protecting spammers under one or both of those charges?
Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
So what we're doing is eschewing personal privacy in exchange for... corporate privacy? It used to be years ago, I could setup a web server on a xDSL line from home and run a small business off of that. Of course, few people want to post their cell phone number (often their only number) online, or any other method of direct contact. Amongst other things, that would invite spam. 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? So domains owned by individuals or sole-proprietorships are screwed, but corporations have little to worry about: They can just assign some random techie to be the contact for their domain.
Re:The first amendment is dead and buried... (Score:4, Interesting)
NOT just an economic problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Spam is ultimately an economic problem. As long as spam remains highly profitiable spamming will continue.
I won't assume this to mean a 'silent approval' for spamming, but it does sound you take this as a given. IMHO that is not true. There are other reasons why spam remains a problem:
Basically, a combination of technical, political and legal reasons, beside the economic ones. Spam continues because the parties profiting from it aren't held accountable.
Clean GoDaddy - Clean 80% SPAM scum (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The first amendment is dead and buried... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can only imagine next year it could include P2P users and eventually anyone doing something abnormal like running tor
To put it lightly... if you really believe that you need to get out of the basement more :)