The company behind the proposed .xxx top-level domain, which was rejected after the Bush administration intervened, has been trying to dig up embarrassing government documents through a federal lawsuit. Make that “was trying.” Last week a federal judge granted summary judgment to the Bush administration in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ICM Registry. More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
Large scale spammer Robert Soloway, whose criminal trial was scheduled to start in a week and a half pled guilty to most of the charges against him. The indictment made three categories of charges. Counts 1-10 were mail fraud, due to Soloway delivering his spamware through the mail, and the product egregiously failing to be what he said it was, notably including 30 million addresses purported to be opt-in. Counts 11-17 seven were wire fraud, sending spam making false claims about the product, support, guarantee… More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
In the aftermath of the shutdown of Wikileaks.org by a court order issued at the request of Swiss Bank Julius Baer, Wikileaks has called for the boycott of registrar eNom. eNom is best known as the domain registrar that complied with the federal government’s order to shut down a Spanish travel agency because it did business with Cuba — the agency was not under U.S. jurisdiction and so was hardly violating U.S. law, but their domain was registered in the United States, and that was good enough for the feds. More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
Back in January, bulk mailer E360 filed a suit against giant cable ISP Comcast. This week Comcast responded with a withering response… Their memorandum of law wastes no time getting down to business: “Plaintiff is a spammer who refers to itself as a “internet marketing company,” and is in the business of sending email solicitations and advertisements to millions of Internet users, including many of Comcast’s subscribers.” Comcast’s analysis is similar to but even stronger than the one I made in January… More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
In the news lately have been a number of incidents where U.S. courts, or the U.S. government itself has ordered domain registrars to shut down free speech. First was the E360 vs Spamhaus case, in which accused spammer E360 Insight sued anti-spam organization Spamhaus for labeling them as spammers and won by default when Spamhaus insisted that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction over them in England and didn’t appear. Unfortunately, U.S. courts did have jurisdiction over Spamhaus’ domain registrar, who was nearly ordered to shut Spamhaus down (a court order was under consideration). Fortunately, Spamhaus was able to move their registration overseas before any shutdown order could be issued… More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
Last week Sen. Snowe filed bill S.2661, the Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008, or APCPA. While its goals are laudable, I have my doubts about some of the details. The first substantive section of the bill, Section 3, makes various phishy activities more illegal than they are now in its first two subsections. It makes it specifically illegal to solicit identifying information from a computer under false pretenses, and to use a domain name that is deceptively similar to someone else’s brand or name on the web in e-mail or IM to mislead people… More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) has posted a position paper and analysis of S. 2661, introduced on 2/25/08 in the US Senate. While we are firmly opposed to phishing and other criminal activities that may utilize domain names we are very concerned about the provisions of the proposal that appear to provide trademark owners with a means to avoid both UDRP and ACPA actions and alternatively bring private claims against domain names with a lower burden of proof and the potential for far higher monetary damages, without even requiring an allegation that the DN was in any way being utilized in a phishing scheme… More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
Thanks to Prof. Goldman I see that the Virginia Supreme Court issued its opinion in Jaynes, the state-law criminal spam case that has wound its way through the courts there. It affirms the conviction and rejects the various challenges to Virginia’s spam statute… As a side note I should say that it’s not often one is actually excited to read an order in a case you’re not involved with. This is definitely one of those instances where the excitement is palpable… The news reports billed the case as the first felony conviction for sending spam. More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
Several people pointed out that although the suit still hasn’t appeared in PACER, copies of the complaint are available online, including this one [PDF] at Lextext. Having read it, I’m rather underwhelmed… I do not purport to be a lawyer (nor do I usually play one on the net), but it’s hard to see how the facts, which are not in serious dispute, would support any of these charges. More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back
This post is based on the scenario that a trademark.tld domain name is registered with a UK ICANN accredited registrar, (they have an exclusive UK jurisdiction clause in their contracts), the trademark.tld criticism website located at that domain name is strictly non-commercial, the servers are located in the UK, and the registrant is a British citizen. In the above circumstances, the corporations and/or their lawyers are taking a big risk when they use the Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policies (UDRP) in order to silence criticism at trademark.tld. More…
Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back