[IP] more on ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend spamhaus.org
Begin forwarded message:
From: Bryan Webb <bwebb@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 11, 2006 9:59:17 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [IP] more on ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend
spamhaus.org
Dave,
For IP, if you wish...
Thanks for publishing Prof. Ezor's response. I found his reference
to 47
USC 230 ("Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive
material") most interesting.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode47/
usc_sec_47_00000230----000-.html
By my reading of it, DNS is an "Interactive Computer Service", and
SpanHAUS,
ICANN, and TuCOWS are "Information Content Providers".
47 USC 230 (c) says
(c) "Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive
material"
(1) "Treatment of publisher or speaker"
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be
treated as
the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another
information
content provider.
(2) "Civil liability"
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held
liable
on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or
availability of material that the provider or user considers to be
obscene,
lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise
objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally
protected;
or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content
providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material
described in paragraph (1).
If we agree that spam and UCE are "otherwise objectionable", then the
filtering actions of ISPs generally is protected and unactionable
under the
law, and SpamHAUS is specifically protected by subpart (B). SpamHAUS
wouldn't exist and it would surely not be so popular if spam and UCE
were
not objectionable.
While the law is geared toward restricting access to material
inappropriate
to minors, it does appear to be broad enough to encompass protections
for
SpamHAUS and ICANN, and probably the other registries.
--Bryan Webb
This is not an automated signature. I type this at the bottom of every
message.
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