FC: Federal judge denies order against Realtime Blackhole List

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

A federal district court in Massachusetts last month denied a request by an 
accused spam-friendly ISP for an injunction against the Mail Abuse 
Prevention System, which maintains a list of "offending" sites:
http://mail-abuse.org/pressreleases/2001-01-02.html

The reasoning: "There is a serious question whether MAPS's assertion that 
Media3 is 'spam-friendly' is defamatory because the statement appears to be 
accurate."

The decision is at:
http://pub.bna.com/eclr/00cv12524.htm

Background on a related lawsuit is:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-01281.html

Recently I've done some investigation into spam statistics. Contrary to 
what I wrote in a message here last July, the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List 
-- at issue in the lawsuit -- is *not* one of the best ways to stop spam. 
Another service, called the Relay Spam Stopper and also provided by MAPS, 
is far more effective in practice:
http://status.hiwaay.net/spam.shtml

Both follow the same principle of a list of "offending" IP addresses that 
should be quarantined. But RSS is updated more quickly and is 
semi-automated. RBL is slower:
http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss/

Some observers have said this raises censorship concerns; MAPS correctly 
replies that it's an exercise of private property rights -- a spammer does 
not have the right to force you to use your computing resources to accept 
their messages:
http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss/rights.html

-Declan




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