Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 27 Jul 2010 It's legal to jailbreak your iPhone, sort of Copyright Law Recent fairly breathless news coverage has said that the US government has said it's legal to jailbreak your iPhone. That's somewhat correct but the reality is, as usual, somewhat more complex. See more ... posted at: 22:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Copyright_Law/jailbreak.trackback 14 Jul 2010 One more round in E360 Insight vs. Spamhaus Email Back in 2007, the Seventh Circuit sent the case back to the trial court and it's been moving very, very, very slowly, mostly because E360 repeatedly failed to respond when they were supposed to. On June 11, Judge Korcoras made his decision. He found plaintiff David Linhardt's estimates of his losses rather unpersuasive, and awarded him $1 on claims of tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, and $1 for defamation. But he also awarded $27,000 for interference with E360's existing contracts, based on one month's revenue from his three customers Smart Bargains, Vendare, and Optinbig. A few days ago, Spamhaus' lawyers filed a very clever motion to reconsider. See more ... posted at: 23:37 :: permanent link to this entry :: 4 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/she360again.trackback 12 Jul 2010 Does the First Amendment forbid spam filtering? Email A friend of mine wrote to ask: The Supreme Court overturned the Jaynes conviction on First Amendment grounds, yes? I'm wondering what that could mean from the spam filtering perspective. Spam filters, and in particular DNS blacklists are intended to prevent e-mail from being delivered. Doesn't the First Amendment make it illegal to block speech? The short answer is no, but of course it's slightly more complicated than that in practice. See more ... posted at: 03:07 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/filter1st.trackback 26 Jun 2010 The .XXX fiasco is almost over ICANN At Friday's meeting of the ICANN board in Brussels, they voted, probably for the last time, to approve the 2004 application for the .XXX domain. Purely on the merits, there is of course no need for a top level domain for porn. This isn't about the merits, this is about whether ICANN follows its own rules. Despite overheated press reports, .XXX will not make porn any more available online than it already is (how could it?), there is no chance of all porn being forced into .XXX (that's a non-starter under US law), and .XXX will have no effect on the net other than perhaps being a place to put legal but socially marginal porn far away from any accidental visitors. See more ... posted at: 01:50 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/xxxok.trackback 06 Jun 2010 Does CAN SPAM cover affiliate spam? Email Affiliate marketing is a popular way to advertise on the Net. A company signs up affiliates, or more often an intermediary that signs up the affiliates, and pays for each lead or each sale. Web affiliate marketing is fairly respectable (check out my Amazon affiliate store and the links on my airline ticket web site) but mail affiliates, particularly mail affiliates through intermediaries, are a cesspit. While there are doubtless mail affiliates that behave themselves, there are far too many of them that sign up and spam like crazy on the somewhat accurate theory that the more spam they send, the more responses they will get and the more leads they'll have to sell, with the only downside being that they might have a cheap hosting account cancelled. The marketers and intermediaries invariably make the affiliates promise not to spam, but since they don't know what addresses the affiliates are mailing to, and see only the leads and (maybe) the occasional complaint from recipients of the ads, it's extremely difficult to monitor what the affiliates are doing. Moreover, it is very hard to build a substantial true opt-in mailing list, and if you have a good list, its value for your own business is too great to be worth annoying the people on it by sending third-party ads. Hence affiliates have to use lousy lists, such as purchased lists of dubious provenance, addresses mechanically scraped off web sites. It's an open secret in the business that the business is full of sleazeballs who will cheerfully do things like using a suppression list provided by marketer A as a prospect list for marketer B. With this in mind, does a marketer bear responsibility under CAN SPAM for mail that affiliates send? The answer, both from the wording of CAN SPAM and from simple logic, should be of course it does, but the sad tale of ASIS vs. Azoogle suggests that judges think it doesn't, at least not in the Ninth Circuit. See more ... posted at: 00:52 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/asisaff.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 13 Email - 144 ICANN - 72 Money - 8 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs Spam resource (Al Iverson) The Spam Diaries (Ed Falk) Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins) Related sites IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group Network Abuse Clearinghouse Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

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