20 October 2006

Kudos to Kocoras and ICANN

Looks like I was overly pessimistic about the Spamhaus case:

On 19 October 2006, United States District Court Judge Charles P. Kocoras, presiding over the e360Insight v. The Spamhaus Project matter in the Northern District of Illinois, issued an order denying e360Insight's ("e360") motion asking the Court to, among other things, suspend www.spamhaus.org. The Court explained that the relief e360 sought was too broad to be warranted under the circumstances. First, the Court noted that since there is no indication that ICANN or Tucows acted in concert with Spamhaus, the Court could not conclude that either party could be brought within the ambit of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(d), which states that an order granting an injunction is "binding only upon the parties to the action, their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys, and upon those persons in active concert or participation with them." Second, the Court stated that a suspension of www.spamhaus.org would cut off all lawful online activities of Spamhaus, not just those that are in contravention of the injunction the Court previously issued against Spamhaus.

Kudos to Kocoras for his intelligence, and to ICANN for not rolling over as I feared they would.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Not so fast... Kudos to ICANN yes, but to Kocoras? Judge Kocoras *DID* sign a court order ordering domain registrar Tucows to turn over the domain spamhaus.org to the spammers (this is confirmed by Tucows). When the spammers presented the order to Tucows they got a shock as Spamhaus had in the meantime moved the domain to France.

But if the domain had been at Tucows, Kocoras's order to turn it over to the e360 spammers would have been excecuted and that would have been a disaster for internet email. So no Kudos to Kocoras at all, kodos only to Spamhaus for realizing Kocoras WOULD sign such an order and moving the domain before he did.

Glyn Moody said...

OK, thanks for the clarification.