News Lawyer

From Wired.com, a story about a blacklisted Russian hosting firm with alleged criminal ties threatening a lawsuit to be removed from the blacklist. In the past, organizations like Spamhaus would place companies who spammed and engaged in other disagreeable activity on a blacklist. Online service providers rely on these blacklists to help configure their spam filters, which then weed out e-mails that contain IP addresses of blacklisted companies. Unfortunately, these companies would then quickly find another IP address and begin their activities anew. Blacklist organizations quickly tired of this “whack-a-mole” game. Now, blacklist organizations will collect the IP addresses of hosting firms who don’t do enough to police their networks from spammers, and blacklist the entire hosting firm, which could hurt the innocent. With marketing e-mails caught in spam filters rather than proceeding to inboxes, placement on any blacklist is thus a big deal to both the marketers and their hosts. MAPS, a predecessor of Spamhaus, got into trouble for allegedly abusing this power. Russia apparently has a different way of dealing with spam.