Court denies plea to shut down Spamhaus (Anti-Spam Site)

[Ian David]

Court denies plea to shut down Spamhaus
By: Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service (London Bureau) (20 Oct 2006)

A U.S. judge has denied an appeal that would have suspended the domain name for The Spamhaus Project Ltd., averting a potential quagmire over how U.S. legal rulings apply across the global Internet.

Spamhaus, a group of computer security experts based in London, creates a database used by security vendors to block unsolicited bulk e-mail, known as spam.

Last month, an e-mail marketing company, e360 Insight LLC, won an $11.7 million judgement against Spamhaus in U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois. The ruling also called for Spamhaus to remove e360 from its blacklists.

Spamhaus, which has been sued in the U.S. several times, typically ignores the rulings. It says U.S. courts do not have jurisdiction over it since the group is based in the U.K. Spamhaus maintains that e360's e-mail constitutes spam and violates U.K. law.

The U.S. lawsuits against Spamhaus typically end there, but earlier this month e360 raised the stakes. On Oct. 6 it asked the U.S. court to force the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Spamhaus's domain registrar, Tucows Inc., to suspend its domain name.

The request sparked speculation that ICANN, which is subject to U.S. law, would be required to enforce that law internationally by, for example, shutting down a foreign Web site. ICANN said later that even if a court did order it to shut down a domain, it couldn't do that since that power lies with individual registrars.

More:
http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/News/0df7e3b5-3acd-4d77-b34a-1a15b4f68cbb.html

[katinmn]

1. Interesting! Bookmarking. This is something to watch.

[htuttle]

2. If they win the case to close Spamhaus, it'll just go underground

I use Spamhaus' blackhole list at work to help keep our mail server cleaner. There are several other lesser known blackhole servers, and if they go down, other ones will come back up.

This is war.