Comments on: Court deals blow to dating-service spammer

Federal appeals court rejects argument that spammers have First Amendment right to flood public universities with spam.

[calbear--2008]

The Right to Spam?

I thought CAN-SPAM required opt-in in order for SPAM to be 'legal'. Where is the legal basis for LonghornVentures? I guess the University doesn't have the right to block a whole IP range as some students may in fact want that spam but what would've probably worked better is to have the students amass and file a class action lawsuit against Longhorn Ventures since their addresses were taken from a freedom of information request and Longhorn Ventures is not a partner of the University of which the student have given their consent to share.

CAN-SPAM, etc

First, congress is too entrapped by the corporate lobbists to ever make a law that requires people to "opt-in". The governed are too stupid, passive or both to rise up and force congress to do otherwise.

As for CAN-SPAM, it requires you the intended spam recipient to "opt-out". The spammer is suppose provide a valid return email address and a mechanism to opt out, hyper link, email address, etc. As long as Longhorn Ventures was doing that, they were basically following the letter of a poorly written law.

As for blocking the spammer's IP address block, as far as I'm concerned, the network infrastructure belongs to the university and as such, the university is free to manage those assets as it see fit, including blocking or filtering traffic. The only caveat to that I might consider would be if there is some kind of contract where the students are paying a fee, perhaps as part of their tuition, to access the network. That would be a weak argument at best given the legal profession's great skill at weasel wording and obfuscation. All you have to do is look at the service contracts for many of the big ISPs to see they are perferctly within their rights to prohibit certain uses of their network infrastructure. Otherwise, they wouldn't get away with blocking incoming traffic to ports 25(SNMP) and 80(HTTP) to keep customers from setting up mail and web servers, etc.

[Raife]

I thought it was the other way around...

I thought "CAN-SPAM" actually specifies "opt-out", -which, in reality, means confirming your e-mail address as valid to "spammers". Which, by the way, is the first big "no-no" in avoiding "SPAM" in the first place.

Of course, most sites that require "voluntary registration", DO specify that they can use and distribute your email-address, at their discretion, to "...partners" -which can actually mean, anyone who pays for it.

And, once a third party has it, they can sell it to their "...partners", ...etc, ...etc, ...etc.

Either way, most people now seem to believe that the only REAL "legal" EFFECT of "CAN-SPAM", was primarily to legitimize "SPAM", -effectively protecting it, not reducing it.

So, the only real reducer of "SPAM", these days, seems to have been private-filtering efforts- such as this colleges action.