Court deals blow to dating-service spammer

An online dating service does not have the right to blast unsolicited e-mail at thousands of University of Texas e-mail addresses, a federal appeals court ruled.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said Tuesday that the university did not run afoul of federal law or the U.S. Constitution when blocking a torrent of spam from White Buffalo Ventures' LonghornSingles.com site.

The University of Texas may "implement the Regents' Rules without violating" spammers' rights, a three-judge panel unanimously concluded.

White Buffalo, an Austin, Texas, start-up that boasts of making "a ton of moolah" by promoting relationship-based Web sites, began its bulk e-mail campaign in February 2003 by filing a freedom of information request that gave it nearly all the university's e-mail addresses. Two months later, it began deluging the school's servers with commercial solicitations--and had its Internet addresses blocked after refusing to stop when asked.

Most spammers might halt their efforts at that point, but White Buffalo was unusually determined. It filed a lawsuit against the University of Texas and sought a court injunction protecting what amounted to a right to spam--citing both the federal Can-Spam Act and the First Amendment, which broadly limits a government university's ability to restrict free speech.

The case appears to be the first in which a court considered how the Can-Spam Act--which overrules most state laws dealing with junk e-mail--regulates how a state university can install spam filters.

In its ruling this week, the 5th Circuit refused to overturn a trial judge's opinion siding with the university. It concluded that the Can-Spam Act was never intended to block an Internet service provider, even one that is part of a government-run university, from filtering out unwanted commercial solicitations. But the judges did suggest that the University of Texas could have taken narrower steps to filter e-mail rather than blocking all correspondence from a range of Internet addresses.

Neither the University of Texas nor White Buffalo immediately responded to a request for comment Wednesday.

[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.