Spammers Win One

A known spammer (David Linhardt, aka e360 Insight) sued the anti-spam group Spamhaus because Spamhaus lists them as being a spammer. The spammer sued them in an Illinois Court, despite the fact that Spamhaus operates solely in the United Kingdom. Due to some issues with Spamhaus's legal defense strategy, the Illinois Court has issued a judgement of $11,715,000.00 against Spamhaus, and is proposing an order directed towards ICANN to revoke Spamhaus's domain name. There is a significant amount of concern in the IT community about this action. The obvious question is how does the United States claim jurisdiction over an entity that resides solely in the United Kingdom? Earlier this year, the United States Government urged the European Union to back away from proposals to move the root DNS servers to the control of an international body (like the United Nations). Their main argument was that every little nation could use that to impose its laws on the Internet. And here a court in the United States is doing exactly that. This could give supporters of a "UN-controlled Internet" a lot of ammunition. And that would be a disaster for everyone.

I'm hoping that the United States Court of Appeals will reject this nonsense. If Spamhaus goes dark, not only will a lot more spam find its way into people's e-mail, but it means that any spammer can sue (and quite possibly win) if somebody anywhere in the world calls them a spammer. In the meantime, I added code to my graylisting proxy tonight to support RBL's (the lists of spammers published via DNS). Since the spammers hate Spamhaus with a passion, my mail server is now looking at what Spamhaus has to say.